As power needs of AI push emissions up and put big tech in a bind, companies put their faith in elusive — some say improbable — technologies.
The tech giant and its partners say they expect to harness fusion by 2028, an audacious claim that bolsters their promises to transition to green energy but distracts from current reality. In fact, the voracious electricity consumption of artificial intelligence is driving an expansion of fossil fuel use — including delaying the retirement of some coal-fired plants.
A ChatGPT-powered search on Google, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a traditional search. One large data center complex in Iowa owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent amount of power as 7 millionThe data-center-driven resurgence in fossil fuel power contrasts starkly with the sustainability commitments of tech giants Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta, all of which say they will erase their emissions entirely as soon as 2030.
Microsoft was the only one of the four major firms driving the AI boom to answer detailed questions from The Washington Post about their energy needs and plans.“If we work together, we can unlock AI’s game-changing abilities to help create the net zero, climate resilient and nature positive works that we so urgently need,” Microsoft said in a statement.
“This is very quickly becoming an issue of, don’t get left behind locking down the power you need, and you can figure out the climate issues later,” said Aaron Zubaty, CEO of Texas-based Eolian, a major developer of clean energy projects. “That deal disturbed a lot of people,” Zubaty said. “When massive data centers show up and start claiming the output of a nuclear plant, you basically have to replace that electricity with something else.”At the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland in January, Altman said at a Bloomberg event that, when it comes to finding enough energy to fuel expected AI growth, “there is no way to get there without a breakthrough.
Gates is the founder of his own nuclear company, called TerraPower. It has targeted a former coal mine in Wyoming to be the demonstration site of an advanced reactor that proponents claim would deliver energy more efficiently and with less waste than traditional reactors. The project has been saddled with setbacks, most recently because the type of enriched uranium needed to fuel its reactor is not available in the United States.
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