AI is both a new threat and a new solution at the UN climate conference
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- AI requires enormous amounts of energy, threatening global net zero goals.
- Tech giants may use fossil fuels short-term, raising concerns about clean energy commitments.
- AI is also ushering in an era of nuclear power, however, which is cleaner.
The rapid development of AI is likely to affect global net zero goals in both positive and negative ways.
Tech companies are investing in nuclear power plants to fuel AI data centers. Many of these power plants generate power through nuclear fission, which is considered cleaner than fossil fuels and more reliable than wind or solar power.
Silicon Valley investors, meanwhile, are investing in nuclear fusion, a still-nascent technique for generating power that fuses the nuclei of atoms. It could generate even more energy than fission, with fewer greenhouse gas emissions and less radioactive waste.
Some industry leaders believe that nuclear energy might be the only reliable way to meet the demands of the AI revolution.
"AI requires massive, industrial-scale amounts of energy," Franklin Servan-Schreiber, the CEO of nuclear energy startup Transmutex, previously told Business Insider. "Only nuclear power will be able to supply this massive energy demand in a reliable manner."
However, developing a reliable network of power plants is still a long-term goal that will necessitate huge investment and government support.
As of August 2023, there were only 54 nuclear power plants operating in the United States, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Companies like Amazon and Google have struck deals with companies building smaller, modular reactors that are faster to roll out than traditional reactors. However, the money is still "a drop in the bucket" compared to the billions these companies will ultimately need, physicist Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC, told Nature.
In the meantime, tech giants may turn to fossil fuels to meet their short-term energy needs.
"Tech is not going to wait 7 to 10 years to get this infrastructure built," Toby Rice, the CEO of natural gas producer EQT, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "That leaves you with natural gas."
Rice told the Journal that at a recent energy conference, he was repeatedly asked two questions: "How fast can you guys move? How much gas can we get?"
According to the Financial Times, last week, at the UN COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, Big Tech companies flew under the radar more than usual. Many opted out of displaying in the conference's business area, known as the green zone. Some attendees speculated that the surge in energy use for AI data centers has put the tech industry's clean energy commitments under scrutiny.
"If our industry starts getting treated similar to oil and gas, the public relations to counter that are going to be very expensive," said Kevin Thompson, chief operating officer at Gesi, a business group focused on digital sustainability, told the FT.
Data centers — now powered by a mix of natural gas, coal, and renewable energy sources — are expected to rise from a current rate of 3 %to 4% of US power demands to 11% to 20% by 2030, according to a report from McKinsey.
AI leaders, however, hope the intelligence revolution will inevitably lead to an energy revolution.
"My hopes and dreams is that, in the end, what we all see is that using energy for intelligence is the best use of energy we can imagine," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview at the University of Hong Kong this week.