By Jo Nova

The winds of change are howling through electricity grids

Since 2022, AI -related firms have stormed the S&P 500 market — growing by $12 trillion dollars.

The IEA just posted a whole report dedicated to AI. The demand from data-centers is so large in some places it is already rivaling the kind of monster consumption we are used to seeing from aluminum smelters. There are six states in the United States where data centers already consume over 10% of the electricity supply. In Ireland, data centers swallow about 20% of the electricity.

Currently, a normal data center consumes the same amount of electricity as 100,000 houses. But the new gargantuan data centers under construction will consume 20 times as much — equivalent to adding 2 million homes to the grid.

Data centers of the world are not spread evenly. In Virginia, the largest conglomeration of industrial data, their demand for power pulls in a quarter of the state’s electricity.

Australia is being left behind, because we won’t build coal plants in case we offend the UN, and we banned nuclear power as a fashion statement in 1998. The AI global race is on, but digital machines […]