"Given that most of the country’s power is still generated from fossil fuels, this raises some obvious climate concerns. Major tech companies have started investing in next-generation energy technologies like nuclear fusion, carbon capture, and small modular nuclear reactors. But those require lead time and in some cases luck, and the same companies want new data centers now. Data center growth is already helping to extend the life of coal-fired power plants and fueling a boomlet for the gas power providers furnishing Silicon Valley titans with new turbines. There is nothing inevitable, though, about the tremendous energy demand that AI boosters say they’ll need.

“Nobody has any idea what AI electricity usage in data centers is going to be in three to four years,” says Jonathan Koomey, a researcher and consultant who studies the energy impact of internet and information technology. Electricity demand is indeed growing for the first time in over a decade, he says. Not all of that is from data centers, and larger spikes in demand are generally concentrated in places with new factories and data centers, like Virginia and Georgia. The modest overall load growth happening now, moreover, doesn’t indicate that there’s some looming crisis in which the U.S. will run out of electricity as data centers proliferate.

The bigger risk may well be that these fantastical demand projections are used to bring new fossil fueled power plants online and keep existing ones running—regardless of whether they’re actually needed. Once built, new coal or gas plants are likely to operate for decades. “When people think it’s a crisis they make big mistakes,” Koomey says. “It’s absolutely not a crisis.”"

https://newrepublic.com/article/189460/ai-data-centers-coal-fossil-fuels-energy

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