S3E5 | The Impact of Digitization and AI

What is the role of AI in the future of Energy?You read about artificial intelligence or AI every day. But I was surprised that Ai could be a factor in the energy transition, both as a sophisticated way of developing new solutions and optimizing current processes but also as a new source of growing energy demand with the new data centers and computing chips that are very energy-hungry. Data centers are not what they used to be before the AI revolution. data centers have exploded in size in terms of power consumption. Ten years ago, a 30-megawatt (MW) center was considered large. Today, a 200-MW facility is considered normal and a 1GW center is proposed. I don’t think the utilities saw this coming. I think this was a surprise to most folks. In our episode today we have USC professor Dr. Benham Jafarpour from the USC Information Sciences Institute to help us better understand the opportunities and challenges of AI and how these new hyperscale data centers are impacting energy demand forecasts. Some of the tech companies from Silicon Valley are even turning to private power contracts where they negotiate deals with geothermal and even nuclear power generators to run their new data centers. The new AI GPU chips are very energy-hungry and have changed the way data centers have to be operated. This should be another real eye-opener for all of us.ReferencesSubsurface Energy and Environmental Systems (SEES) https://sees.usc.edu/ https://carboncredits.com/u-s-data-centers-power-demand-surges-to-46000-mw-whats-driving-the-growth/