The Dark Side Of AI’s Power And Storage Needs

In the last few years, the artificial intelligence (AI) industry has grown immensely.

A great deal of this has to be credited to generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and its capabilities, which has seen almost all businesses vying to include the technology in their products, services and internal processes.

However, as AI companies and tech conglomerates accelerate their efforts to develop advanced AI products and capabilities, some concerns have been raised about its energy consumption as well as the increasing costs of IT infrastructure needed to support its development.

So, how is the AI sector creating problems for other industries? Let’s explore!
 

What Problems Is AI Creating In The Power Industry?

 

• According to Rene Haas, the CEO of Arm, warned about severe consequences that the energy industry could face due to the unsustainable demands of AI.

• Arm, a semiconductor and software design company that itself produces chips that help power AI and ML (machine learning) development, made its name for developing energy-efficient CPUs to help smartphones enhance their battery life by reducing power consumption.

• Haas believes a similar move is due for the AI industry, saying AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT “are just insatiable in terms of their thirst ... The more information they gather, the smarter they are, but the more information they gather to get smarter, the more power it takes.”

• As per Haas, the lack of greater efficiency could result in AI data centers consuming 20% to 25% of the US power requirements, which at present is around 4% or less. “That’s hardly very sustainable, to be honest with you.”

• This trend has been observed by technology experts as companies that own and operate electric-power plants have seen their stock prices rise.

• The problems won’t just be restricted to the energy industry but could also stretch to the AI industry and hamper its progress, with Haas saying, “It’s going to be difficult to accelerate the breakthroughs that we need if the power requirements for these large data centers for people to do research on keeps going up and up and up.”

• Haas was speaking at an event announcing a $110 million funding program for AI research at universities in the US and Japan, where Arm and its parent company were jointly offering $25 million for the program. Haas voiced his hope that the US-Japan partnership would also work towards solving the energy issue.

 

What Problems Is AI Creating In The Storage Industry?

 

• The AI revolution has got almost all businesses yearning to get a taste of the latest technology and its newest updates. This also means that AI companies and developers are looking to lead the way by expanding their capabilities and capacities to produce better tools.

• This has resulted in an increase of prices not only for GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), an integral part of AI model training but also SSDs (Solid-State Drives) and large-capacity HDDs (Hard Disk Drives).

• Since Q3 2023, the price of HDDs has been steadily rising between 10% and 20%, which is due to AI-powered servers and data centers needing large-capacity drives. The prices are expected to continue rising by around 5% to 10% in Q2 2024.

• Furthermore, this has also resulted in Western Digital AKA WD, one of the largest drive and data storage companies, revealing that HDDs and SSDs are experiencing supply shortages.

• The increased demand even led Scott Davis, the SVP of Channel and Regional OEM sales of WD, to inform customers that the prices for flash drive and hard drive products would increase in the current quarter, with some surges expected immediately.

• The increase in prices was also observed for some consumer products and not just enterprise-grade HDDs.

Do you think AI companies, tech conglomerates and governments should work together and take Rene Haas’ suggestion building energy sustainable options to develop AI? Do you think the same needs to be done for storage efforts to ensure the prices of SSD and HDD devices don’t soar to unreasonable levels?

Let us know in the comments below!