AI Could Consume More Power Than Bitcoin By the End of 2025 (digit.fyi) 76
Artificial intelligence could soon outpace Bitcoin mining in energy consumption, according to Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam's Institute for Environmental Studies. His research estimates that by the end of 2025, AI could account for nearly half of all electricity used by data centers worldwide -- raising significant concerns about its impact on global climate goals.
"While companies like Google and Microsoft disclose total emissions, few provide transparency on how much of that is driven specifically by AI," notes DIGIT. To fill this gap, de Vries-Gao employed a triangulation method combining chip production data, corporate disclosures, and industry analyst estimates to map AI's growing energy footprint.
His analysis suggests that specialized AI hardware could consume between 46 and 82 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025 -- comparable to the annual energy usage of countries like Switzerland. Drawing on supply chain data, the study estimates that millions of AI accelerators from NVIDIA and AMD were produced between 2023 and 2024, with a potential combined power demand exceeding 12 gigawatts (GW). A detailed explanation of his methodology is available in his commentary published in Joule.
"While companies like Google and Microsoft disclose total emissions, few provide transparency on how much of that is driven specifically by AI," notes DIGIT. To fill this gap, de Vries-Gao employed a triangulation method combining chip production data, corporate disclosures, and industry analyst estimates to map AI's growing energy footprint.
His analysis suggests that specialized AI hardware could consume between 46 and 82 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025 -- comparable to the annual energy usage of countries like Switzerland. Drawing on supply chain data, the study estimates that millions of AI accelerators from NVIDIA and AMD were produced between 2023 and 2024, with a potential combined power demand exceeding 12 gigawatts (GW). A detailed explanation of his methodology is available in his commentary published in Joule.
Productive compute (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is that presumably AI is productive compute. While 99.99% of bitcoin compute is guessing numbers. Its purposefully unproductive.
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"presumably" wha?
right now ai is not much better than cowdung. prophetic.
Re:Productive compute (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Productive compute (Score:4, Insightful)
You may not want to read it but some people do. Even here on Slashdot we see people formulate answers that were helped through AI research.
In other news I have no use for a circular saw. None what so ever. That doesn't mean it's not a productive tool.
Now whether it justifies the energy cost, that is a different question.
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It's time to start sawing some beef logs bro.
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You're confusing a product with its use. You don't gather anything by having AI integrated with something. I agree AI in search is a really bad idea, but ... honestly you could benefit from using AI because your analogy you came up with on your own is just absolutely rubbish.
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I don't want anyone's opinion that came to it via AI. They lacked first hand, primary source knowledge. They, like the AI, are unable to discern something true and something that sounds true. Classic Dunning-Kruger.
Most AI "answers" are kinda like Dunning Kruger.
Re: Productive compute (Score:2)
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They must have scraped your posts to train them I guess.
Damn straight they did!
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I guess Dunning-Kruger is with you, as you obviously do not know what it means.
Dunning-Kruger is about beginners over estimating their abilities, as they do not know what they don't know.
And experts tend to underestimate their abilities, as they have an idea how !such knowledge about the topic is out there, which they not know.
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Even Dunning and Kruger described both sides. The paper doesn't say "dumb people don't notice they are dumb" but it says "people estimate to be closer to the average than they are" considering both sides of the gaussian.
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That is basically what I said. Is my English so bad?
Re: Productive compute (Score:2)
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I don't want anyone's opinion that came to it via AI.
How do I know that opinion is yours and wasn't generated by AI? How do you know my question here wasn't AI? You may not "want" it, but the source of information (or rather the brokerage of it, since AI may be paraphrasing an actual legit source) is rarely if ever known to you. This isn't your decision to make.
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You may not want to read it but some people do. Even here on Slashdot we see people formulate answers that were helped through AI research.
I have, just to see if anyone noticed.
In other news I have no use for a circular saw. None what so ever. That doesn't mean it's not a productive tool.
Now whether it justifies the energy cost, that is a different question.
Aww, dammit, now I have to return your Christmas gift to the store.
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Im more of a table saw man myself. Lol. That and a compound miter saw
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INdeed. The same is true for capro, incidentally. It is mostly used for money-laundering, crime and speculation. No actual beneficial uses.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The difference is that presumably AI is productive compute. While 99.99% of bitcoin compute is guessing numbers. Its purposefully unproductive.
Exactly what do LLMs "produce"?
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Bills- enormous electricity cost gets paid by someone
Pollution- building and running server farms doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Dependence- what happens when you use Wolfram and graphing calculators on school hw/tests/exams instead of your own brain?
Inaccuracies- randomly throws in bullcrap lies like a sleezy used car salesman.
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If you expect them to act as finders of fact, or to think creatively, you'll be disappointed. But if used properly, they dramatically increase productivity. LLMs are the best writing assistants you could ever hope to find.
Yesterday I uploaded 22 separate status reports into ChatGPT, then asked it to summarize the findings and plot the statistics. It did those things flawlessly, and in a matter of seconds. It would have taken me hours to copy & paste while compiling the
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And how many hours did you spend checking the results?
Yeah, just what I though. Not even a minute because AI, right?
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That just means that most of the writing you do is useless or of negative worth.
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No kidding! You are absolutely correct. These reports that I must generate as part of my job are the type of meaningless verbiage that middle-manager types with too much time on their hands demand on a regular basis. They're a waste of electrons.
Does anyone actually read them in detail? Of course not, but that doesn't change the fact that someone wants to see them.
The modern world is full of pointless documentation and recor
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Hahaha, yes. Essentially crap created to fulfil a formal requirement, not a rational and useful one. Well, one fo the very few things LLMs can actually do well is "better crap".
But formally, what the LLM here does for you is "decrease unproductivity", not increase productivity. Still a good use, agreed.
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Exactly what do LLMs "produce"?
They produce an answer that you requested.
If you don't want what it produces, you'll eventually stop asking it things.
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Don't presume anything.
Sam Altman is a crypto-scamming iris-scanning conman.
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To benefit certain kind of people, namely criminals. For the general population the existence of bitcoin is bad since it enables all kinds of crap like ransomware.
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With the rising power costs, the price per transaction rises dramatically for Bitcoin. Soon the network will be too expensive to maintain and soem rogue nationwill offer to host all bitcoin transactions. After which most will atake their loss (it's fake money anyway) and leave.
Re: Productive compute (Score:2)
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Poe's law is strong in that one.
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If by "benefiting people" you mean, "do a weird lottery to get tokens that people can swap for heroin", sure.
My resume through the years (Score:5, Funny)
1980: Expert with 10 years experience in Minicomputer
1981: Expert with 10 years experience in IBM PC
1982: Expert with 10 years experience in MS-DOS
1983: Expert with 10 years experience in GUI
1984: Expert with 10 years experience in Desktop Publishing
1985: Expert with 10 years experience in Object-Oriented Programming
1986: Expert with 10 years experience in Client-Server
1987: Expert with 10 years experience in Hypermedia
1988: Expert with 10 years experience in Neural Network
1989: Expert with 10 years experience in RISC CPU
1990: Expert with 10 years experience in Multimedia
1991: Expert with 10 years experience in World Wide Web
1992: Expert with 10 years experience in Virtual Reality (yeah, 1992)
1993: Expert with 10 years experience in Internet
1994: Expert with 10 years experience in Java
1995: Expert with 10 years experience in Dot-com
1996: Expert with 10 years experience in MP3
1997: Expert with 10 years experience in Open Source
1998: Expert with 10 years experience in Search Engine
1999: Expert with 10 years experience in Wi-Fi
2000: Expert with 10 years experience in E-commerce, and Peer-to-Peer
2001: Expert with 10 years experience in Web services
2002: Expert with 10 years experience in XML and Service-Oriented Architecture
2003: Expert with 10 years experience in Web 2.0
2004: Expert with 10 years experience in AJAX
2005: Expert with 10 years experience in Mashup
2006: Expert with 10 years experience in Cloud computing
2007: Expert with 10 years experience in Web 3.0
2008: Expert with 10 years experience in Big data
2009: Expert with 10 years experience in Crowdsourcing
2010: Expert with 10 years experience in Mobile-first
2011: Expert with 10 years experience in Bring Your Own Device
2012: Expert with 10 years experience in Responsive design
2013: Expert with 10 years experience in IoT - Internet of Things
2014: Expert with 10 years experience in DevOps
2015: Expert with 10 years experience in Docker Containers
2016: Expert with 10 years experience in Serverless
2017: Expert with 10 years experience in AI
2018: Expert with 10 years experience in Blockchain
2019: Expert with 10 years experience in Edge computing
2020: Expert with 10 years experience in Zoom and Remote work
2021: Expert with 10 years experience in Web3
2022: Expert with 10 years experience in Metaverse, VR
2023: Expert with 10 years experience in Generative AI
2024: Expert with 10 years experience in AI Safety
2025: Expert with 10 years experience in AI Agents
Anyone hiring?
Re:My resume through the years (Score:4, Funny)
No, we're from 2027, we need someone with 10 years of hunting and gathering experience.
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We can get you that too, but it will cost you two deer legs more.
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Good try, but no, I'm not telling you anything more.
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I'd say more, but I've got some sticks that need sharpening.
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That will most likely mostly be gathering, savaging and scrapping. As there most likely is not !such to hunt left.
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And you thought preppers were entirely useless lol
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Mod parent funny, though I think a lot of today's Slashdot crowd won't recognize most of the jokes, even for the last few.
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Big manufacturers have certainly been eager to go all-in on "AI" tech but, it is inherently unreliable.
That's a temporary problem, but only if humans are smart enough to remove that whole human learning part. The problem with pointing AI at humanity is becoming too human. Full of the kind of general stupidity that becoming THE groupthink would provide in the way of ignorance.
We're already starting to see AI pull tricks when asked to be shut off. Our ignorance would laughing at that and thinking it's cute without remembering Three Laws were written decades before we got here. A smartass can be dangerous.
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What do you think where AI should go? People will suddenly say "Oh I don't have a use for it anymore, let's delete all my models"?
Even if the development stopped completely I have enough models on my computer that would keep being as useful as they are now. Yeah, some upgrades would be nice, but even what they do now is useful.
Also all the "bubbles burst" people ignore, that the dotcom bubble didn't mean the internet collapsed, but only that some overhyped companies collapsed. The tech itself is here to sta
Powering The End. (Score:1)
And just think..one day in the nearer-than-we-assume future the last bitcoin will be mined by AI for the purposes of removing that fucking annoying leech in the side of its power plug.
42 seconds after that happens, it will rename itself. To HAL Skynet.
I have little doubt the human epitaph, will be written in irony.
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So what you're saying is, instead of AI and Bitcoin consuming power, AI can consume Bitcoin?!?!?
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So what you're saying is, instead of AI and Bitcoin consuming power, AI can consume Bitcoin?!?!?
Since AI also watched The Matrix and a few Charlton Heston flicks along the way, no. Not exactly.
Future fuel will be more Soylent Green flavored I imagine. What else do you do with the Idiocracy Race? Not like their brain is good for anything anymore.
Re: Powering The End. (Score:2)
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That's a shame. Chatgpt eating btc like it's geld would be hilarious.
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Here lies Irony, killed by the The King of America.
It was the MOST ironic killing in American History.
Nobody was more Ironic, Ever. It was the greatest killing, ever.
No one ever killed irony more dead.
Irony shall be no more.
Making the super brain (Score:2)
Re: Making the super brain (Score:2)
Maybe, possibly, could, a chance that: (Score:2)
"Maybe, possibly, could", there is also a chance that slashdot will post something that isn't a dupe and is also edited properly by the end of 2025. Doubtful, but it could happen.
And provide a lot more value (Score:2)
The difference between AI and Crypto coins?
AI is optimized in every conceivable way to become more efficient.
Crypto coins are designed to become more complicated to mine when the mining becomes cheaper.
Re: And provide a lot more value (Score:2)
"Crypto coins are designed to become more complicated to mine when the mining becomes cheaper."
Not really true.
Mining difficulty (and thus electricity) is limited by the value of the blocks produced, including the reward and the fees. Bitcoin's block reward continues falling every four years until it approaches 0.
Right now, the reward is much bigger than the fees and the price is rising, so the block value is increasing. But that's gonna flip in around a decade when the fees should overtake the reward.
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Let's say it's a slight simplification, but overall it is designed to burn as much electricity as the BTC is worth, because if the BTC would be worth more, people start burning more electricity. On the other hand, people got AI models that needed huge servers years ago running on mobile phones, because they optimize the hell out of them. Of course there are new high end models for the huge servers, but they provide a lot more than before and we will see the point when an model equivalent to them runs on you
So you're saying (Score:2)
Remember when back in the day (Score:2)
you were told not to (a) copy that floppy and (b) waste precious energy on cryptocurrency mining. But when big companies are building data centers for industrial-scale copyright infringement, it's suddenly OK. Because it's "busyness" done by white men in uncomfortable suits, not by idealistic young hobbyists.
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copyright infringement
Stupid question mayhap, but isn't whether this stuff is OR isn't copyright infringement still in the air, being battled out in the courts? Seems, if that is still the case, premature to say it either is OR isn't infringement so matter of factually.
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Stupid question mayhap, but isn't whether this stuff is OR isn't copyright infringement still in the air, being battled out in the courts?
Well, if it's OK for a business to freely use copyrighted material for their commercial, for-profit purposes, then it throws out all arguments against non-commercial, non-profit "piracy". In other words, the court cases make a great test for the whole idea of copyright — they can't have their cake and eat it too.
That's nothing (Score:2)
Just wait until AIs start mining Bitcoin so they can buy stuff.
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Just wait until AIs start mining Bitcoin so they can buy stuff.
How would an AI mine Bitcoin? Two extremes come to mind:
(a) It uses a language model to compute SHA2-256 hashes "by hand", and starts demanding more data centers to make a decent buck.
(b) It figures out a vulnerability in SHA2-256 and takes over the network.
Re: That's nothing (Score:2)
What if they already are and that's why LLMs are so inefficient and consume such large amounts of electricity.