How AI is Subsidized by Your Utility Bills and Drives Copper Prices
upstart writes:
How Your Utility Bills Are Subsidizing Power-Hungry AI:
This summer, across the Eastern United States, home electricity bills have been rising. From Pittsburgh to Ohio, people are paying $10 to $27 more per month for electricity. The reason? The rising costs of powering data centers running AI. As providers of the largest and most compute-intensive AI models keep adding them into more and more aspects of our digital lives with little regard for efficiency (and without giving users much of a choice), they grow increasingly dependent on a growing share of the existing energy and natural resources, leading to rising costs for everyone else.
In particular, this means that average citizens living in states that host data centers bear the cost of these choices, even though they rarely reap any benefits themselves. This is because data centers are connected to the whole world via the Internet, but use energy locally, where they're physically located. And unlike the apartments, offices, and buildings connected to a traditional energy grid, the energy use of AI data centers is highly concentrated; think as much as an entire metal smelting plant over a location the size of a small warehouse. For example, the state of Virginia is home to 35% of all known AI data centers worldwide, and together they use more than a quarter of the state's electricity. And they're expanding fast - in the last 7 years, global energy use by data centers has grown 12% a year, and it's set to more than double by 2030, using as much electricity as the whole of Japan.
The costs of this brash expansion of data centers for AI are reflected first and foremost in the energy bills of everyday consumers. In the United States, utility companies fund infrastructure projects by raising the costs of their services for their entire client base (who often have no choice in who provides them with electricity). These increased rates are then leveraged to expand the energy grid to connect new data centers to new and existing energy sources and build mechanisms to keep the grid balanced despite the increased ebb and flow of supply and demand, particularly in places like Virginia that have a high concentration of data centers. Also, on top of amortizing the base infrastructure cost, electricity prices fluctuate based on demand, which means that the cost of having your lights on or running your AC will rise when there is a high demand from data centers on the same grid.
These costs also come with dire impacts on the stability of an energy infrastructure that is already stretched to the breaking point by growing temperatures and extreme weather. In fact, last summer, a lightning storm caused a surge protector to fail near Fairfax, Virginia, which resulted in 200 data centers switching to local generators, causing the demand on the local energy grid to plummet drastically. This nearly caused a grid-wide blackout and, for the first time, made federal regulators recognize data centers as a new source of instability in power supplies, on top of natural disasters and accidents.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.