The data centres needed to power AI are guzzling electricity by the gigajoule. By 2026, the International Energy Agency predicts data centres’ energy consumption will increase by between 35% and 128%, adding each year something between the annual energy consumption of Sweden and Germany. Potential remedies for this looming energy crisis include introducing new chip architectures, switching to analogue computing and using photonics to encode data in light instead of wires.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03408-z?mc_cid=eaa1a99559&mc_eid=7f01981b78
