The increasing electricity consumption by AI and Bitcoin mining is causing significant concerns in the United States. Data centers, which are concentrated in specific regions, consume substantial amounts of electricity, posing a potential risk of rationing. Companies like Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) are exploring renewable energy solutions, but challenges such as the weak national grid and slow growth of renewables persist.

 

Transcript:

AI use of electricity is already a problem in many places in the United States.

No one knows exactly what the figures are, but between AI and certainly Bitcoin mining, we’re looking at the point where there are municipalities and even states where the issue is going to come up.

Do we ration electricity to cities, towns, even parts of states so that AI can keep growing?

How big a problem is this right now?

It’s a growing problem. And from the data that we’ve looked at here at 24-7, we know that data center electricity use over the last year was a gigantic terawatt number, which was about 2% of the total global electricity use, which is just staggering.

And I think that the concern is that a lot of the data centers are housed in similar areas, some in the Virginia, Arlington, Washington, D.C. area. And so then it could be a huge drag on major cities to where it’s so concentrated.

So yeah, I think it’s a growing problem and it’s expected to get bigger.

Microsoft recently said that they’re going to try to set up centers that will generate electricity for AI. And they fundamentally said, we’re going to look all over the world. And my guess is that they will try to find places in the world where either the electricity is from a grid that’s solid or where they can build basically green farms, you know, solar, wind, and use renewables to do this.

Well, they should do that in the Mojave Desert or cities like that where it’s always sunny.

There are two challenges to that. The first one is you would have to build a brand new grid because the grid across the United States is so weak, unless you were going to have these centers very isolated.

The other problem is that renewables are not growing fast enough. They are not keeping pace. If you look at electricity use, if you look at what AI is going to do, wind, solar, unless we start to build new smaller nuclear plants, I don’t see this working.

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