The State of AI: Energy is king, and the US is falling behind

This week, Casey Crownhart, senior reporter for energy at MIT Technology Review and Pilita Clark, FT's columnist, consider how China's rapid renewables buildout could help it leapfrog on AI progress. In the age of AI, the biggest barrier to progress isn't money but energy . That should be particularly worrying here in the US, where massive data centers are waiting to come online, and it doesn't look as if the country will build the steady power supply or infrastructure needed to serve them all. For about a decade before 2020, data centers were able to offset increased demand with efficiency improvements . Now, though, electricity demand is ticking up in the US, with billions of queries to popular AI models each day--and efficiency gains aren't keeping pace. With too little new power capacity coming online, the strain is starting to show: Electricity bills are ballooning for people who live in places where data centers place a growing load on the grid.