If you want to know where AI is headed, this year’s Google I/O has you covered. The company’s annual showcase of next-gen products, which kicked off yesterday, has all of the pomp and pizzazz, the sizzle reels and celebrity walk-ons, that you’d expect from a multimillion dollar marketing event.
But it also shows us just how fast this still-experimental technology is being subsumed into a line-up designed to sell phones and subscription tiers. Never before have I seen this thing we call artificial intelligence appear so normal. Read the full story.
—Will Douglas Heaven
AI could keep us dependent on natural gas for decades to come
Last December, Meta announced plans to build a massive $10 billion data center for training its artificial intelligence models in rural northeast Louisiana. Stretching for more than a mile, it will be Meta’s largest in the world, and it will have an enormous appetite for electricity.
To power the data center, a Meta contractor called Entergy will build three large natural-gas power plants with a total capacity of 2.3 gigawatts. It’ll also upgrade the grid to accommodate the huge jump in anticipated demand.
The choice of natural gas as the go-to solution to meet the growing demand for power from AI is not unique to Louisiana. The fossil fuel is already the country’s chief source of electricity generation, and large natural-gas plants are being built around the country to feed electricity to new and planned AI data centers. That’s all but wiping out any prospect that the US will wean itself off natural gas anytime soon. Read the full story.
—David Rotman
This story is part of Power Hungry: AI and our energy future—our new series shining a light on AI’s energy usage. Check out the rest of the package here.
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