Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, asserts that artificial intelligence (AI) will aid rather than obstruct climate targets. Addressing concerns about AI’s energy demands, Gates highlighted that AI’s efficiency improvements could surpass the additional energy required by new datacenters.
Speaking at a London conference hosted by his venture fund, Breakthrough Energy, Gates emphasized that while datacenters might increase energy demand by up to 6%, AI’s potential to reduce energy consumption could more than compensate for this rise. He stressed that AI could accelerate a reduction in energy usage by over 6%, outweighing the energy consumed by datacenters.
Let’s not go overboard on this. Datacentres are, in the most extreme case, a 6% addition [in energy demand] but probably only 2% to 2.5%. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6% reduction? And the answer is: certainly.
Bill Gates – Breakthrough Energy Summit in London
Critics worry that the growth of AI datacenters could lead to increased energy use, potentially hindering climate progress. According to estimates by Goldman Sachs, running a query through ChatGPT requires nearly 10 times more electricity than a Google search. However, Gates argued that the benefits of AI in optimizing technology and electricity grids would be substantial.
Gates pointed out that tech companies are keen to invest in green energy, often paying a premium to ensure their operations are powered by renewable sources. This willingness, he believes, will drive further investments in clean energy, helping to balance the increased demand from AI datacenters.
Breakthrough Energy, Gates’s venture fund, supports over 100 companies involved in the energy transition. Additionally, the Gates Foundation invests heavily in AI, with substantial stakes in Microsoft and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.
Supporting Gates’s optimism, a study in Nature Scientific Reports found that generative AI could produce significantly less CO2 than humans for certain tasks. Moreover, Google’s application of AI to its data centers in 2016 resulted in a 40% reduction in cooling costs and a 15% decrease in overall electricity use for non-IT tasks.
Despite these advances, Gates warned that the world might miss its 2050 climate targets by 10 to 15 years due to insufficient green electricity to replace fossil fuels quickly. He expressed concern that the transition to green energy is not happening fast enough to meet the net-zero emissions goal by 2050.
In summary, Bill Gates believes that AI will play a crucial role in achieving climate goals by making systems more efficient, thus outweighing the additional energy demands of datacenters.
