Gartner predicts two-fifths of existing AI facilities won't have enough power in two years' time

Artificial intelligence (AI) is running up energy use faster than generators can provide power, and data centres could become operationally constrained in just two years' time, analyst firm Gartner predicts.

The electricity consumption of data centres is estimated to increase by as much as 160 per cent by 2027, reaching 500 terawatt hours (TWh) per year.

This, Gartner said, is 2.6 times the level of power usage in 2023.

Gartner analyst Bob Johnson used the word "explosive" to describe the growth in hyperscale data centres for generative AI (GenAI), adding that it creates "an insatiable demand for power that will exceed the capability of utility providers to expand their capacity fast enough."

Source: Gartner

"New larger data centres are being planned to handle the huge amounts of data needed to train and implement the rapidly expanding large language models (LLMs) that underpin GenAI applications,” Johnson said.

“However, short-term power shortages are likely to continue for years as new power transmission, distribution and generation capacity could take years to come online and won’t alleviate current problems," he added.

Unfortunately, the rapidly increasing demand for power will hurt zero-carbon sustainability goals, Gartner said.

“The reality is that increased data centre use will lead to increased CO₂ emissions to generate the needed power in the short-term,” Johnson said.

“This, in turn, will make it more difficult for data centre operators and their customers to meet aggressive sustainability goals relating to CO₂ emissions," he added.

Large cloud and AI operators are already looking to nuclear to meet energy demand and Gartner said renewables such as wind and solar cannot meet the requirement of data centres to have around the clock power availability.

Urgently ramping up power production - somehow - isn't the only snag to hit the booming AI industry. OpenAI, which sparked the current AI frenzy by making its ChatGPT application available to the public is reportedly seeing improvement for the technology slowing down and starting to plateau.

news: OpenAI's upcomning Orion model shows how GPT improvements are slowing down

It's prompting OpenAI to bake in reasoning and other tweaks after the initial model training phase. pic.twitter.com/VwD1xSbZUv

— Amir Efrati (@amir) November 9, 2024

The fix for that seems to be bolting on reasoning after the training is done for LLMs.