Earlier this week, OpenAI announced a “strategic partnership” with AI chipmaker Nvidia in which the duo of tech giants will build and deploy upwards of 10 gigawatts of AI data centers.
Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in the project, an enormous project that could end up requiring an astronomical amount of electricity to run.
As Fortune reports, the planned data centers would consume as much as the entire city of New York City — and the Sam Altman-led company isn’t stopping there. Existing projects tied to president Donald Trump’s Stargate initiative could add another seven gigawatts, or roughly as much as San Diego used during last year’s devastating heat wave.
“Ten gigawatts is more than the peak power demand in Switzerland or Portugal,” Cornell University energy-systems engineering professor Fengqi You told Fortune. “Seventeen gigawatts is like powering both countries together.”
OpenAI and tech giant Oracle already have an enormous Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas, which draws enough electricity to power half a million homes. Five new projects are expected to total seven gigawatts, as part of Trump’s half-a-trillion-dollar AI data center initiative.
It’s an almost unfathomable escalation in the power usage of AI — and computing as a whole.
“It’s scary because… now [computing] could be 10 percent or 12 percent of the world’s power by 2030,” University of Chicago professor of computer science Andrew Chien told Fortune. “We’re coming to some seminal moments for how we think about AI and its impact on society.”
To the AI industry, it’s all part of the plan.
“Everything starts with compute,” Altman said in a statement accompanying its Nvidia partnership announcement. “Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilize what we’re building with NVIDIA to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale.”
The industry’s doubling down on building out AI infrastructure has been accompanied by major environmental concerns, with tech giants admitting that they’re falling far short of their own carbon emission goals.
While the tech’s exact carbon footprint remains elusive, AI data centers are putting a major strain on local water supplies to keep hardware cool.
Additional pressure on power grids will also lead to a rise in carbon dioxide emissions, unless the AI industry finds a way to pivot to renewable energy sources in a meaningful way. You told Fortune that it may eventually become inevitable for companies to switch to nuclear plants, which could “take years to permit and build.”
“In the short term, they’ll have to rely on renewables, natural gas, and maybe retrofitting older plants,” he added.
As companies continue to pour tens of billions of dollars into infrastructure buildouts, the tech’s carbon footprint is expected to grow.
It’s an unfortunate reality that the industry will have to reckon with one way or the other, especially considering the ongoing human-activity-fueled climate crisis.
“They told us these data centers were going to be clean and green,” Chien told Fortune. “But in the face of AI growth, I don’t think they can be. Now is the time to hold their feet to the fire.”
More on AI energy usage: Researchers Just Found Something Extremely Alarming About AI’s Power Usage
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