AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution.
As power needs of AI push emissions up and put big tech in a bind, companies put their faith in elusive — some say improbable — technologies.
By Evan Halper and Caroline O'Donovan from The Washington Post
June 21, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
The mighty Columbia River has helped power the American West with hydroelectricity since the days of FDR’s New Deal. But the artificial intelligence revolution will demand more. Much more.
So near the river’s banks in central Washington, Microsoft is betting on an effort to generate power from atomic fusion — the collision of atoms that powers the sun — a breakthrough that has eluded scientists for the past century. Physicists predict it will elude Microsoft, too.
The tech giant and its partners say they expect to harness fusion by 2028, an audacious claim that bolsters their promises to transition to green energy but distracts from current reality. In fact, the voracious electricity consumption of artificial intelligence is driving an expansion of fossil fuel use — including delaying the retirement of some coal-fired plants.
In the face of this dilemma, Big Tech is going all-in on experimental clean energy projects that have long odds of success anytime soon. In addition to fusion, tech giants are hoping to generate power through such futuristic schemes as small nuclear reactors hooked to individual computing centers and machinery that taps geothermal energy by boring 10,000 feet into the Earth’s crust.
Tech companies had promised “clean energy would be this magical, infinite resource,” said Tamara Kneese, a project director at the nonprofit Data & Society, which tracks the effect of AI and accuses the tech industry of using “fuzzy math” in its climate claims.
“Coal plants are being reinvigorated because of the AI boom,” Kneese said. “This should be alarming to anyone who cares about the environment.”
Power Grab
The artificial intelligence industry is driving a nationwide data center building boom. These sprawling warehouses of computing infrastructure are creating explosive demand for power, water and other resources. Power Grab investigates the impacts on America and the risks AI infrastructure creates for the environment and the energy transition.
As the tech giants compete in a global AI arms race, a frenzy of data center construction is sweeping the country. Some computing campuses require as much energy as a modest-sized city, turning tech firms that promised to lead the way into a clean energy future into some of the world’s most insatiable guzzlers of power. Their projected energy needs are so huge, some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet them from any source.
Data centers, the nondescript warehouses packed with racks of servers that power the modern internet, have been around for decades. But the amount of electricity they need now is soaring because of AI. Training artificial intelligence models and using AI to execute even simple tasks involves ever more complicated, faster and voluminous computations that are straining the electricity system.
A ChatGPT-powered search, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a search on Google. One large data center complex in Iowa owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent amount of power as 7 million laptops running eight hours every day, based on data shared publicly by the company.
The data-center-driven resurgence in fossil fuel power contrasts starkly with the sustainability commitments of tech giants Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta, all of which say they will erase their emissions entirely as soon as 2030. The companies are the most prominent players in a constellation of more than 2,700 data centers nationwide, many of them run by more obscure firms that rent out computing power to the tech giants.
“They are starting to think like cement and chemical plants. The ones who have approached us are agnostic as to where the power is coming from,” said Ganesh Sakshi, chief financial officer of Mountain V Oil & Gas, which provides natural gas to industrial customers in Eastern states.
Tech companies are confronting this dilemma with bravado. Artificial intelligence thinkers such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, a major backer of Microsoft’s fusion start-up partner Helion, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who invests big in other fusion efforts, say breakthroughs in energy are achievable.
Scientists have been chasing the fusion dream for decades but have yet to overcome the extraordinary technical challenges. (Chona Kasinger for The Washington Post))
Helion hopes to capture the energy created by fusing atoms — in the start-up's case, in a magnetized vacuum chamber — and then channeling that energy into a usable form. (Chona Kasinger for The Washington Post)
The companies also argue advancing AI now could prove more beneficial to the environment than curbing electricity consumption. They say AI is already being harnessed to make the power grid smarter, speed up innovation of new nuclear technologies and track emissions.
Microsoft was the only one of the four major firms driving the AI boom to answer detailed questions from The Washington Post about its energy needs and plans. Google, Amazon and Meta offered limited statements.
“If we work together, we can unlock AI’s game-changing abilities to help create the net zero, climate resilient and nature positive works that we so urgently need,” Microsoft said in a statement.
The tech giants say they buy enough wind, solar or geothermal power every time a big data center comes online to cancel out its emissions. But critics see a shell game with these contracts: The companies are operating off the same power grid as everyone else, while claiming for themselves much of the finite amount of green energy. Utilities are then backfilling those purchases with fossil fuel expansions, regulatory filings show.
Amazon says it has been “the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for four straight years.” Google wrote that it is using AI “to accelerate climate action,” which is “just as crucial as solving for the environmental impact associated with it.”
As for Microsoft, the company said that “by 2030, we will have 100% of our electricity consumption, 100% of the time, matched by zero carbon energy purchases.”
Left unmentioned are the heavily polluting fossil fuel plants that become necessary to stabilize the power grid overall because of these purchases, making sure everyone has enough electricity.
In the Salt Lake City region, utility executives and lawmakers scaled back plans for big investments in clean energy and doubled down on coal. The retirement of a large coal plant has been pushed back a decade, to 2042, and the closure of another has been delayed to 2036.
Rig operators in November connect drills to access heat reservoirs near Milford, Utah, as part of a Fervo Energy project that expects to be fully operational in 2028. Google recently powered up a futuristic geothermal Fervo power plant in Nevada. (Ellen Schmidt/AP)
Among the region’s mega energy users is Meta. It’s building a $1.5 billion data center campus outside Salt Lake City that consumes as much power as can be generated by a large nuclear reactor. Google has purchased 300 acres across the street from Meta’s data center and plans its own data center campus. Other data center developers are frantically searching for power in the area.
The region was supposed to be a “breakthrough” technology launchpad, with utility PacifiCorp declaring it would aim to replace coal infrastructure with next-generation small nuclear plants built by a company that Gates chairs. But that plan was put on the shelf when PacifiCorp announced in April that it will prolong coal burning, citing regulatory developments that make it viable.