But the article says that energy use by AI is 48% more carbon intensive than the US average. So talk of solar power is a red herring -- that's not what it is running on now.
I don't think there will be much carbon intensive energy creation in a few decades from now. It does not make sense economically.
Anyway I hope you're right, but so far global CO2 output is still growing. All the other energy has only come on top of carbon intensive energy, it hasn't replaced any of it. Every time we build more, we find new ways of spending that much energy and more.
I remember how me and my friends discovered email in 1999 and were like "Yay, in the future we'll all do this instead of sending letters!". And it took about 20 years until letters were largely replaced by email and the web. And when the first videos appeared on the web, it was quite clear to us that they would replace DVDs.
Similar with the advent of self driving cars and solar energy I think.
> The carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers was 48% higher than the US average.
If the people always talking about how cheap solar is want to fix this, find a way to make that cheapness actually make it into the customer's electric bill.
There are periodically news articles and such about data centers in Iceland, of course, but I get the impression it's mostly a fad, and the real build-outs are still in Northern Virginia as they've always been.
The typical answer I've seen is that Internet access and low latency matter more than cooling and power, but LLMs seem like they wouldn't care about that. I mean, you're literally interacting with them over text, and there's already plenty of latency - a few extra ms shouldn't matter?
I'd assume construction costs and costs of shipping in equipment also play a role, but Iceland and Canada aren't that far away.
As for power, that's what I was referring to with geothermal and hydro - Iceland and Quebec both have famously cheap electricity. The former would need a large increase in capacity, for sure, but Quebec already pumps out a lot of power (and regularly sells it to the Northeastern US).
Not saying it wouldn't be difficult, by any means, but it does seem like all the right incentives are there.