AI datacenters consume an enormous amount of electricity when models with billions and trillions of parameters are used in the training stage. According to estimates from the International Energy Association (IEA), training large AI models uses more electricity than 100 households in a year.
The inference stage (processing for the user) also takes a lot of computing time because, although obtaining a single answer from a chatbot does not consume anywhere near the energy it took to create the model used by the chatbot, millions of people may be asking questions simultaneously.
AI vs. Crypto
AI power consumption has yet to rival Bitcoin mining, but it appears close. The combination of both industries is a huge challenge for the U.S. electrical grid. See
AI datacenter,
Bitcoin mining and
small modular reactor.