Global Warming and Tech: The Growing Battle for Energy Resources

Transcript:

Doug McIntyre: Here’s a problem. You’ve got global warming beyond what most people imagined for this point in time.

The need for electricity for cooling is increasing.

At the same time, Bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence are starting to draw electricity levels out of these data centers that are ludicrously high.

And this is all happening at the same time, too.

Dave Callaway: Yeah, there was a report out this week, I glanced at it, that said that in a couple of years, the amount of energy that’s being used on a daily basis just for AI in the US will equal 10 times what’s being used on Google right now.

The amount of energy is incredible.

And as you point out, there’s a furious rush to build new data centers, but they take a while to build.

So the existing ones are struggling.

The largest data center in the U.S. is in Virginia.

As you said, it’s because most of the government data runs through there.

And it’s already an issue there.

They don’t know what to do.

If they have a really hot summer, which they’re projected to have, those data centers are going to be competing with demand for air conditioning, they don’t know what to do.

It was actually an election issue last November on how to cap that type of data use.

So we’re going to start to see that more and more in some of the larger data centers, even as your Googles and your Salesforce’s and Amazon’s rush to build new ones.

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