Bitcoin is estimated to consume 172 TWh, which is way more than Google and Microsoft combined.
172 TWh per year
Your statement was as useful as the following: A VW Polo car costumes 3000 liters of fuel.
*Edit: Downvote me all you want 😂 if I am right I am right.
In 2023, Microsoft and Google consumed 48 TWh of electricity (24 TWh each).
Your point?
The data in the article was for one year. This is the same unit.
The comment was 172TWh without specifying a timeframe whatsoever. Is it a year? Is it a day? A month?
It was about the comment about bitcoin, not the post itself.
That’s the same timeframe as the one used in the article, and sure, they could have made it explicit again, but implicitly it makes sense because it’s the one that’s useful for a direct comparison.
Turns out, the implicit timeframe that should be clear after reading the article was the right one, and it’s pretty damning for bitcoin as is. So again, I am not sure what point you want to make.
In 2023, the two tech companies
The article is also about per year
“While nuclear fusion seems like the perfect solution for AI’s power needs due to its non-existent impact on the environment…”
nonexistent is key here.
Well, it’s definitely non-existant…
Second law of thermodynamics would like to chime in, even with such a perfect nonexistent power source, waste heat is still an issue… which you can radiate to space, which would take tremendous land use to facilitate…
Or we use that land and capital and effort for solar power, which exists and could power practically everything in our lives, minus AI. Sounds like a win to me.
(Also not to mention the necessity to fire up more fossils for this shit to compensate for the current lack of miracle power for their pipe dreams)
But people from those countries must also be using Google and Microsoft
There might be some double counting, but it doesn’t matter - this just illustrates the insane scale of these companies.
Comparing huge multinational countries which serve every country to the half of countries with the smallest energy usage is not terribly illustrative.
I think you meant comparing companies, guessing autocorrect got you.
And I disagree, it’s useful, but more useful would be a chart of countries and multi-nationals, with the company usage removed from the country usage, to see it more clearly.
Correction, the insane amount of energy the AI needs
They want to become carbon neutralbut climate crisis is already running.
Feels like build „don’t smoke here“ - signs in our forests while they are burning.
To be fair, Iceland only has around 400k inhabitants.
Closer to 400k
Right, it was a bit over 100k km², memory is a bitch, corrected.
But we will soon have AGI, and then you can have your very own JARVIS! Don’t you like Iron Man? Don’t you like super heroes? Don’t you like sci-fi? /s
Wake me up when AI can simulate my brain. Literally, run me.exe and let me know.
All fun and games until a moth ends up in your transistors.
ants! ants!
Which movie is this?
I believe it’s Pi (1998). Absolutely crazy movie, you should watch the trailer: https://youtu.be/yRjkQT9xLZs
You pass the butter.
and how much of that is energy that’s essentially used to run other companies, by way of their cloud services? I imagine that’d be a pretty substantial amount.
Are we talking consumed for their own use? Or consumed as part of delivering cloud services to their customers?
These are very different things. The former would be horrifying the latter would be misleading in the extreme.
Many countries don’t use a lot of electricity, especially those where the grids are spotty or in poor repair, or the overall population is small. Even without the AI garbage, I’d expect large tech-sector companies to use more energy than many countries.
(In other words, the headline for this was really poorly chosen. “Microsoft and Google pour more electricity into AI than 100+ countries use” might have gotten a bit closer to the actuall point, if it’s actually true.)
Microsoft and Google pour more electricity into AI than 100+ countries use" might have gotten a bit closer to the actuall point, if it’s actually true
From what I can tell, the article is talking about total electrical use, not just AI.
Also probably ignoring the fact that some of their data centers have practically the entire roof covered in solar panels, Microsoft is investing in nuclear energy, etc.
That is a big probably.
Sun consumes 100000000000+ countries power. We have to do something!
And both of these companies build and purchased more renewable energy sources than all 100+ countries combined. Microsoft has committed to be carbon free by 2030, and while I don’t belive in their commitment, they at least seem to be trying contrary to most nations. They even invested in nuclear plants for their power needs.
You can fault both companies for a lot of different reasons, but in terms of carbon emissions due to power usage, they are better than 99.9% of the countries on that list.
They didn’t build it. They buy from local suppliers, power that could have been used by people and companies already there. Now it’s just a lot more, while a serious part of the power consumption goes into debatable purposes like overhyped AI stuff.
Edit: and fwiw, recently Microsoft themselves announced that they are far from their reduction targets roadmap, so not sure where you got the happy flow news from
