By 2027, yearly power demands of AI could surpass those of small countries, research finds

New Delhi: By 2027, the electricity powering artificial intelligence (AI)-related activities could exceed the yearly power demands of countries such as the Netherlands, Argentina and Sweden, new research finds. Wide adoption of AI could have a large energy footprint as generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT that create content based on the data they were trained on are undergoing rapid growth since 2022, noted the research published as a commentary in the journal Joule.

Training these tools is an energy intensive process as it requires feeding the models a large amount of data, said author Alex de Vries, a researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.