[dredmorbius]

Growth trend matters more than absolute present value.

Data centres generally had been seeing energy use growing at 12% annually, or with a doubling time of 5.8 years (about 5 years 10 months). AI is accelerating that trend.

In the United States, power consumption by data centres is on course to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030. Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals. In advanced economies more broadly, data centres are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030, putting the power sector in those economies back on a growth footing after years of stagnating or declining demand in many of them.

<https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electric...>

[protocolture]

>Growth trend matters more than absolute present value.

Only if the current absolute present value is enough that the resulting trend matters.

It was only 2 weeks ago when someone posted an article claiming data centers worldwide use 24x less water than golf courses worldwide.

And I mean, you need somewhere to collate all that climate data? You need telecoms to let scientists communicate?

>Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals. In advanced economies more broadly, data centres are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030, putting the power sector in those economies back on a growth footing after years of stagnating or declining demand in many of them.

If horse use trends continue at their current pace, London will be covered in 20 meters of horse manure by the end of the decade.

> In advanced economies more broadly, data centre's are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030

20% of the growth isn't much overall either is it? That's likely assuming that the million and 1 spruiked projects actually get off the ground.

[dredmorbius]

Only if...

No.

If the trend continues.

Exponential growth, a/k/a constant periodic percentage growth (per day, month, year, etc.), increases rapidly. Differences (or errors) in magnitude measurement disappear rapidly: a factor of two in a single generation, a factor of ten in about three generations, a factor of 100 in less than 7, a factor of one thousand in fewer than 10.

What matters is that the growth rate continue.

Which of course, it usually doesn't. Most growth trends follow a sigmoid rather than exponential curve (initially), or more complex longer-term dynamics.

The point of your infamous horse quote was less to show that the Earth would be covered in horses (or their effluvia), than that the observed current trend could not reasonably continue. And as some of us are aware, it didn't, due to the adoption of ... the petroleum-fueled automobile ... which has some bearing on this particular HN post itself.

Had the automobile not come along, or petroleum reserves proved much more limited as was widely believed at the time[1], large horse-congested cities such as London, New York, and Chicago would likely have seen sharply slowed or even reversed growth under negative hygiene pressures. It was the multiple factors of growth in fossil fuel use (displacing horses, and their effluvia), development of sewerage systems, solid waste disposal, food safety and purity, refrigeration, and public health which turned cities from death zones to attractive living places, rather than merely drawing desperate immigrants through high wages amidst rampant rural and foreign poverty.

But the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.

2030 is three and a half years away. That's soon.

________________________________

Notes:

1. It wasn't until the 1930s with the discovery of the East Texas Oil Field in the US and of vast fields in Saudi Arabia that it seemed likely that oil was more than a short-term resource. In marked contrast to, say, the short-lived Indian natural gas boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_gas_boom>. Daniel Yergin's The Prize is an excellent history of the industry's growth, though I disagree strongly with the author's strong allegiance to it.

[protocolture]

>Exponential growth, a/k/a constant periodic percentage growth (per day, month, year, etc.), increases rapidly. Differences (or errors) in magnitude measurement disappear rapidly: a factor of two in a single generation, a factor of ten in about three generations, a factor of 100 in less than 7, a factor of one thousand in fewer than 10.

Exponential Growth in datacenters is extremely unlikely.

I doubt it could be sustained for half a generation before Colo became cheaper than air.

>But the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.

If you add "Sustained" in sure, but its unsustainable, leading back to the starting point mattering more than the rate.

Theres not enough RAM for now. You double colo space worldwide, and there's simply not going to be computers to put in there. That's just the canary, there's indicators of other component shortages. But like, pretending this is exponential will quickly burn out other things. Steel. Powder Coat. Fibre.

Not to mention that funding for data center expansion is already drying up and projects are being cancelled. I honestly dont believe in a single local project that isnt branded NextDC or Equinix. Outside of them I wouldnt be surprised if 90% of projects failed to materialise.

I dont know what world you live in where you think theres an exponential Data Centre growth going on but its not this one. We are already up against the wall. I guarantee you will have a new industry you just learned about to get anxious about by 2030. Just how Bitcoin didn't exponentially grow to consume the whole planets energy supply by 2025 as predicted.

[dredmorbius]

Again: the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.

And again: it usually doesn't. Most growth trends follow a sigmoid rather than exponential curve.

You're arguing against points I'm not making.

The point I am making is to keep an eye on the growth trend (and whatever might constrain that, you've given some credible concerns here), rather than the starting magnitude.

The question of how much societal resource information services can plausibly consume over a long term is an interesting one. Looking at biological analogues, the human brain accounts for roughly 25% of our own metabolic output, which I suspect is the present record.[1]

I get 8% for total present use in commercial computing, with the US EIA projecting a pretty steady growth to exceed all refrigeration, lighting, space cooling, and ventilation, by 2050, at about 350% of present levels. It looks as if that analysis presumes a 5% annual growth rate. The full report does incorporate AI in its considerations.

<https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65564>

Specifically:

We assume AI servers will increasingly skew more energy intensive, the installed stock of AI servers grows exponentially through at least 2040, and computational efficiency will increase over time. In our High Electricity Demand case, we assume the exponential growth in AI servers will continue through 2050, and the rate of improvement in server computational efficiency will reflect historical trends.

Full report: <https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/narrative/>

Notes: ________________________________

1. Apparently among vertebrates typical metabolic fraction is between 2--8%, though there may be some tree shrews which approach humans as a percentage if not total CNS metabolic magnitude. "Ratio of central nervous system to body metabolism in vertebrates: Its constancy and functional basis" (1981) <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15916066_Ratio_of_c...>.

Socially, our computational energy is on the high side for vertebrate animals.

[protocolture]

>to keep an eye on the growth trend

I will be, mostly to add it to the bucket of trends that didn't continue forever as predicted.

>The question of how much societal resource information services can plausibly consume over a long term is an interesting one.

I dont know if biology is a really good model?

>You're arguing against points I'm not making.

No I think I am right on the money.

Small thing increases exponentially compounding every other week, for 2 weeks. Still a small thing.

Small thing increases exponentially for a decade. Now a big thing.

Datacenters increasing at the current rate for a couple more years before hitting several very hard walls. Still a small thing.

If they go from 24 times less water consumption than golf courses as far as 15 times less water consumption than golf courses I would be surprised.

[dredmorbius]

I dont know if biology is a really good model?

I don't either, but it's an extant one, and one in which we can collect a fair bit of largely-unbiased data reasonably immune to short-term manias, unlike, say, stock markets or technology hype cycles.

Over about 4 billion years, and under immense selective pressure, maxing out energy expenditure (biology's chief currency) at roughly 25% of the whole to information processing (input, storage, processing, output) seems to afford maximum benefit. It's also quite possible that genus homo's brain size has decreased over the past 200,000 years or so; h. sapiens neanderthalensis had slightly larger brains than modern h sapiens sapiens, though that size may not have been as intellectually or linguistically capable.

The other possibly interesting data series is of the magnitude of impact of information technology on social capabilities given rates of improvement of the former. Robert Solow, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics". Computer capabilities have increased roughly 33 millions-fold since the 1950s, but productivity hasn't followed that same curve. Even looking at information technology spend vs. growth shows limited gains (computer capacity has become vastly cheaper over the same period, the same outlay buys far more capability than financial values would indicate). It seems likely that AI will follow a similar trend.

Though there've also been some marked transitions where capabilities have exceeded some limit or new applications / formats have become possible. Business computing beginning in the late 1950s, small businesses and universities by the 1970s, personal computing by the early 1980s, general networking in the 1990s, mobile devices in the aughts, algorithmic ad-tech / fin-tech / social media in the 2010s, and AI in the 2020s. There've also been capability-based advances including precision machining, automated equipment and systems controls, digital media (audio/video), accounting, navigation controls (marine, air, rail, land), re-usable rockets (largely from the ability to re-land boosters), massive satellite swarms, and LLM / gradient descent / synthetic annealing artificial intelligence. What the net societal and economic impacts will be isn't clear, and a fair bit of that is already clearly negative, as is the question of how those fruits will be distributed.

All of which affect the question of how big AI's energy footprint can grow. Though I'll note again it's growth rate and duration which matter, not present magnitude.

(Hope for clarity and accessibility that's both sufficiently nuanced and insufficiently verbose, though I've my doubts on the last.)

[asats]

>or with a doubling time of 5.8 years

So that in ~6 years they will account for 1%, and still a fraction of the percent of the world total energy use?

[andreyf]

No, in ~6y they will count for 1% of present day consumption. The rest of the quote compares it to where we expect steel manufacturing projections. It all reads like something that seeks to influence rather than inform.

[dredmorbius]

Modulo, as noted, AI is accelerating that trend.

[myaccountonhn]

1% is a lot.