AI's energy use already represents as much as 20 percent of global data-center power demand, research published Thursday in the journal Joule shows. That demand from AI, the research states, could double by the end of this year, comprising nearly half of all total data-center electricity consumption worldwide, excluding the electricity used for bitcoin mining. The new research is published in a commentary by Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, a research company that evaluates the environmental impact of technology. De Vries-Gao started Digiconomist in the late 2010s to explore the impact of bitcoin mining, another extremely energy-intensive activity, would have on the environment. Looking at AI, he says, has grown more urgent over the past few years because of the widespread adoption of ChatGPT and other large language models that use massive amounts of energy. According to his research, worldwide AI energy demand is now set to surpass demand from bitcoin mining by the end of this year.

Abstract--This study examines the feasibility and profitability of utilizing surplus electricity for Bitcoin mining. Surplus electricity refers to the remaining electricity after net metering, which can be repurposed for Bitcoin mining to improve Korea Electric Power Corporation's (KEPCO) energy resource efficiency and alleviate its debt challenges. Net metering (or net energy metering) is an electricity billing mechanism that allows consumers who generate some or all of their own electricity to use that electricity when they want, rather than when it is produced. Using the latest Bitcoin miner, the Antminer S21 XP Hyd, the study evaluates daily Bitcoin mining when operating at 30,565 and 45,439 units, incorporating Bitcoin network hash rates to assess profitability . T o examine profitability, the Random Forest Regressor and Long Short-T erm Memory models were used to predict the Bitcoin price. The analysis shows that the use of excess electricity for Bitcoin mining not only generates economic revenue, but also minimizes energy loss, reduces debt, and resolves unsettled payment issues for KEPCO. This study empirically investigates and analyzes the integration of electricity surplus in South Korea with bitcoin mining for the first time. The findings highlight the potential to strengthen the financial stability of KEPCO and demonstrate the feasibility of Bitcoin mining. In addition, this research serves as a foundational resource for future advancements in the Bitcoin mining industry and the efficient use of energy resources.

Since generative AI exploded into global consciousness in 2023, an unprecedented demand for computing power has emerged alongside the demand for apps utilising the technology. Tool's like OpenAI's ChatGPT require thousands of Nvidia GPUs (graphics processing units) to smoothly process all the information being fed in and output. Nvidia last week compared GPUs to rare earth metals for AI, saying they're "foundational" for the operation of generative AI today. The energy required to power all this hardware is the equivalent of a small country, according to a report released by French energy company Schneider Electric last year. On Wednesday OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, told an audience at Davos that an energy breakthrough was needed to power AI advances.

A new study warned that artificial intelligence technology could cause a significant surge in electricity consumption. The paper, published in the journal Joule, details the potential future energy output of AI systems, noting that generative AI technology relies on powerful servers and that increased use could drive a spike in demand for energy. The authors point to tech giant Google in one such example, noting that AI only accounted for 10-15% of the company's total electricity consumption in 2021. But as AI technology continues to expand, Google's energy consumption could start to be on the scale of a small country. "The worst-case scenario suggests Google's AI alone could consume as much electricity as a country such as Ireland (29.3 TWh per year), which is a significant increase compared to its historical AI-related energy consumption," the authors wrote.

Are you ready for robots swapping out high-density servers immersed in fluid? TMGcore believes the market is indeed ready for its OTTO data center platform, which is launching at the SC19 conference in Denver. The two-year old company has been refining its technology in a Dallas-area data center, test-driving its two-phase immersion cooling with bitcoin mining hardware, and developing custom servers, a series of micro-data center enclosures, and a robotic system to replace servers. "We've redefined what a data center looks like," said John-David Enright, the CEO of TMGcore, which is partnering with Vertiv, Jabil, Corgan, 3M and Dell Technologies to bring its offering to the data center market. TMGcore says the OTTO platform offers extreme density and efficiency that can radically reduce the space and cost to deploy IT infrastructure. The OTTO system is perhaps the most ambitious effort yet to create an autonomous data center that can be managed by software and robotics.

At this year's BlockShow Asia, Yangdong Deng, chief AI scientist of Blockchain startup Matrix, explained how inserting Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the Blockchain ecosystem would make it possible to use Bitcoin mining computational power for scientific innovation. According to Deng, the current computing power being used in Bitcoin mining operations is 8.23x10²² floating point operations per second (FLOPS for short), while the total computing power in the world is 1.2x10²³ FLOPS. According to these calculations, Bitcoin mining is consuming 17 percent of total global computing power, justifying the frequent accusations that Bitcoin mining is wasteful. Matrix is seeking to reinvent mining algorithms by including AI into the equation through a Bayesian mining system that utilizes a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm (MCMC). Because these computations function similarly to traditional mining functions, they work well for Bitcoin mining.

Two years ago, a Chinese chip-design expert named Micree Zhan was reading China's seminal science-fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, while wrestling with how to create a new processor. He had already designed custom chips for the company he co-founded, Bitmain, that had made it into the world's leading bitcoin miner, allowing it to dominate the new, hyper-competitive industry of unearthing bitcoins. Now he needed a chip that could launch Bitmain onto a new trajectory, one that would help it master a world-altering technology called deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. While performing his nightly meditation, a practice he has kept up for nearly a decade, it suddenly came to Zhan. "It was late at night, and something inspired me--Sophon!" he recalls. A sophon is a fictional proton-sized supercomputer from The Three-Body Problem that is sent by an alien civilization to halt scientific progress on Earth. The aliens use it to take over Earth when their own planet is destroyed by the chaotic gravitational forces of its three suns.