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by Hammerhead12321 256 days ago
> The amount of electricity going into the Internet and AI is wild.

I know these things use a lot, but relative to the national usage is it a significant number? I’ve read this statement a few times but the amount is never quantified to something that makes sense. Like, how much has electricity usage increased in the last two years and can be directly attributed to data centers?
3 comments
more_corn 256 days ago
Yes. The amount of gpu power required to train a foundation model is staggering. Inference isn’t cheap either. There’s a massive boom in datacenter construction. If you remove investment in AI infrastructure and related investments is growth in 2025 would be .01%
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gambiting 255 days ago
According to this - 4% of all electricity used in the US in 2023 was used by AI data centres, predicted to go up to 7-8% in 2028. In some countries like Ireland it's already over 20% of all electricity usage.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/ai-five-charts-that-put-data-cen...

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Nursie 256 days ago
Bitcoin famously uses as much as a mid-sized country like the netherlands now. Wouldn't surprise me if AI use follows.
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bruce511 256 days ago
Um, the Netherlands is not a mid-sized country. Areawise its smaller than West Virginia. Population is around 17 million. (Contrasted to a world population of 8 billion ish.)

If bitcoin is using the same as 17 million people, that'd really not that much in relation to the overall population.

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Nursie 256 days ago
> Um, the Netherlands is not a mid-sized country.

The Netherlands is entry 71 in a list of countries by population, making it very 'mid' indeed. You're comparing it to the USA, which is the third most populous nation on earth, of course it's significantly smaller!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

But hey, let's look at some better figures, estimated energy use is now in the region of 200TWh - https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin...

Which puts it somewhere around an Egypt or a Malaysia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

> If bitcoin is using the same as 17 million people, that'd really not that much in relation to the overall population.

That's a value judgement and you'll notice I've been careful not to put any into my comments.

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bruce511 256 days ago
The problem with the "Olympic Pool" scale of measures is that it has no real meaning to most people.

Yes the Netherlands is "mid table" in a list of countries, but absent a good knowledge of statistics, population distribution, and geographic energy consumption, especially with relation to the Netherlands, it's a meaningless measure.

Since I had none of the above, I went to look it up. And frankly I have no idea if you actually compared Bitcoin to the Netherlands (in terms of energy consumption) or just randomly picked a country.

Let me be general. I have no idea about the Netherlands. I have no idea if you know anything about the Netherlands. That's the root of my concern with your comparison. It "sounds" like a useful comparison- but is it?

Now, had you said that Bitcoin consumes about 0.5% of global energy, and that there are just under 200 countries (meaning on average 0.5% each) then that's a measure I can absorb.

I might then point out that the US consumes 25% of the world energy supply, despite having 5% of global population, so the 0.5% of bitcoin consumption is really not moving the needle.

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Nursie 255 days ago
Once again you seem to have taken offence at a pure comparison, absent any value judgement.

That’s on you.

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