This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
I think it is the customers who pay for the electricity that they use? Las time I checked MS didn't pay anything in my electric bill.
For software and devices running locally, sure. Much of what MS does these days is cloud based where the bulk of the electricity is being used in a data center somewhere and the customer isn't (directly) paying for it.
Well you don't have 1000 vms running in azure, do you? It's not about your Xbox..
No matter which way you correctly read the headline, it's false.
You can either read it as Google and microsoft individually consumed more electricity than these 100 countries did (false, it's Google and microsoft combined)
OR Google and Microsoft combined consimed more than these 100 countries did total.
Did an intern write this or something?
In 2023, Microsoft and Google consumed 48 TWh of electricity (24 TWh each).
Each of them separately.
CoPilot with Gemini plugin did.
Hm. Maybe it's ambiguity is there to maximise clicking on the article?
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.
To be fair, that level of centralization in the hands of a for-profit corporation is worrisome too. They'll lure in small businesses and then enshittify.
They'll lure in small businesses and then enshittify.
I'm not so sure... These "cloud" services are paid services they make a lot of money from, and it's a huge industry with a very large number of competitors (practically all major hosting services, and even a lot of smaller ones).
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.
“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.
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)
"A drop in the bucket" would be an overstatement here.
Non-existent power source for a non-existent tech, a match made in heaven
(meaning what they hype as AI is actually mostly just LLM)
Well, it's definitely non-existant...
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.
