Artificial intelligence requires a lot of power for much the same reason. The kind of machine learning that produced ChatGPT relies on models that process fantastic amounts of information, and every bit of processing takes energy. When ChatGPT spits out information (or writes someone’s high-school essay), that, too, requires a lot of processing. It’s been estimated that ChatGPT is responding to something like two hundred million requests per day, and, in so doing, is consuming more than half a million kilowatt-hours of electricity. (For comparison’s sake, the average U.S. household consumes twenty-nine kilowatt-hours a day.

So 500 Megawatts a day across the globe? This is all just Data Center use? Not even 1/10th the power of the newest and largest data center's power... out of ~11,000 total data centers.

Existing markets are already struggling to meet demand, the report says. In Northern Virginia, the largest data center market in the world at 3,400MW, availability is running at just 0.2 percent.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/us-data-center-power-consumption/

So a drop in the bucket for a crazy useful tool using mostly existing infrastructure...

The finding that global data centers likely consumed around 205 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2018, or 1 percent of global electricity use, lies in stark contrast to earlier extrapolation-based estimates that showed rapidly-rising data center energy use over the past decade (Figure 2).

https://energyinnovation.org/2020/03/17/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-really-use/

The typical cost of building a solar power plant is between $0.89 and $1.01 per watt. A 1MW (megawatt) solar farm can cost you between $890,000 and $1.01 million... According to GTM Research, 1 MW solar farms require 6–8 acres to accommodate all the necessary infrastructure and space between panel rows.

https://coldwellsolar.com/commercial-solar-blog/how-much-investment-do-you-need-for-a-solar-farm/

$300 million and ~2 square miles (7 for reference) to power the entire world's AI use feels like a non-issue to me. A billionaire could literally fund the entire world's daily consumption and not dent their holdings...

Computers use power... More news at 11.