AI systems are already energy guzzlers, but tech companies seem to be planning to increase their energy consumption to some stunning levels in the coming years.
OpenAI alone plans to use as much energy by 2033 as half of India’s installed energy capacity today. As per a report, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had mentioned his plans in an internal Slack message to his team. Altman spelled out what he called OpenAI’s “audacious long-term goal”: to build a staggering 250 gigawatts of capacity by 2033. In the note, he disclosed that OpenAI started the year at around 230 megawatts of capacity and is “now on track to exit 2025 north of 2GW of operational capacity.” OpenAI, thus, plans to increase its energy usage by 125x in eight years.
Now 250 GW of energy is a truly astonishing amount of energy. 250 GW of energy will be more than Germany’s current installed capacity of 164 GW. It will also be more than half of India’s current installed capacity of 475 GW. OpenAI alone wants to use this much power to service ChatGPT and its other services, while other companies like Googe, Meta and Anthropic will likely have their own requirements too.
These are ambitious plans and might not necessarily materialize, but AI is expected to consume vast amounts of electricity in the coming years. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has predicted that AI will end up using 99% of all energy produced on earth in the coming years, up from just 3% now. There have also been concerns around how China could end up upstaging the US in the AI race, given how it was installing energy capacity much faster than its rival. And with US companies alone planning to use as much energy as large nations in the coming years, countries that are able to quickly ramp up their energy production could end up having a big advantage in the age of AI.