Big Tech’s Latest Obsession Is Finding Enough Energy
HOUSTON—Every March, thousands of executives take over a downtown hotel here to reach oil and gas deals and haggle over plans to tackle climate change. This year, the dominant theme of the energy industry’s flagship conference was a new one: artificial intelligence. Tech companies roamed the hotel’s halls in search of utility executives and other power providers.
More than 20 executives from Amazon and Microsoft spoke on panels. The inescapable topic—and the cause of equal parts anxiety and excitement—was AI’s insatiable appetite for electricity. It isn’t clear just how much electricity will be required to power an exponential increase in data centers worldwide.
But most everyone agreed the data centers needed to advance AI will require so much power they could strain the power grid and stymie the transition to cleaner energy sources. Bill Vass, vice president of engineering at Amazon Web Services, said the world adds a new data center every three days. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told the conference that electricity is the key input for deciding whether a data center will be profitable and that the amount of power AI will consume is staggering.
“You go, ‘Oh, my God, this is going to be incredible,’" said Gates. Though there was no dispute at the conference, called CERAWeek by S&P Global, that AI requires massive amounts of electricity, what was less clear was where it is going to come from. Former U.S.
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