Bill Gates has claimed that artificial intelligence will be more of a help than a hindrance to achieving climate goals, despite growing concerns that an increase in the number of new data centers could deplete green energy supplies.
The philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder told reporters that AI would allow countries to use less energy, even as they require more data centers, by making technology and power grids more efficient.
Gates played down fears over the climate impact of AI amid growing concerns that technological advancement could lead to an increase in energy demand and, as a result, require more fossil fuels.
“Let’s not go overboard on this,” Gates said. “Data centers represent, in the most extreme case, a 6% increase (in energy demand), but probably only 2% to 2.5%. The question is: will AI accelerate a reduction of more than 6%? And the answer is: certainly.”
According to Goldman Sachs estimates, a query run through the artificial intelligence chatbot tool ChatGPT requires almost 10 times more electricity to process than a Google search, which could mean carbon emissions from data centers would double in the decade between 2022 and 2030.
Some expert estimates have claimed that an increase in the number of AI data centers could cause electricity demand to rise by up to 10% in developed countries, after years of declining energy due to increased efficiency.
Gates told reporters at a London conference hosted by his venture fund Breakthrough Energy that the additional demand created by AI data centers was more likely to be accompanied by new investments in green electricity because technology companies were “seriously willing” to pay more to use clean sources of electricity. to “say that they are using green energy.”
“Tech companies are the ones willing to pay a premium and help boost green energy capacity,” he added.
Breakthrough Energy has invested in more than 100 companies involved in the energy transition. Gates is also a big investor in AI through the Gates Foundation, which invests around a third of his $77bn (£61bn) wealth in Microsoft. In turn, Microsoft is the largest external investor in OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, and has integrated a set of artificial intelligence tools into its Windows operating system under the Copilot brand.
But his belief that AI could ultimately reduce carbon emissions is not unusual. In February, a peer reviewed article in Nature Scientific Reports argued that generative AI produced between 130 and 2,900 times less CO2 perform simple writing and illustration tasks than if they had been performed by a human.
AI technology has also more directly affected emissions. In 2016, a few years after purchasing the British artificial intelligence laboratory DeepMind, Google announced Google said it was able to use the lab’s deep learning technology to reduce its cooling bill by 40% across all of its data centers. In a stroke, Google said its data centers had to use 15% less electricity as a result, spread across all non-IT tasks.
But a data center’s energy use is only part of the concern about AI’s carbon impact. In Microsoft’s own emissions report, the company says its “scope three,” or indirect, emissions have been trending in the wrong direction, in part due to the impact of the construction of new data centers around the world. , a task that cannot yet be accomplished using renewable energy. electricity.
The rise of “on-device” AI, demonstrated by Microsoft through its new Copilot+ PCs and Apple with its “Apple Intelligence” push to Siri, also muddies the water: Big companies can commit to buying all their electricity from renewable sources, but they can’t make the same promise to their customers, whose new devices consume significantly more power than they otherwise would.
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Gates warned that despite advances in artificial intelligence and green electricity technology, the world would likely miss its 2050 climate goals by up to 15 years because the amount of green electricity needed to phase out fossil fuels was not coming at the pace. fast enough.
He said a delay in the shift to green energy could hamper the decarbonisation of polluting sectors, including heavy industry, making the goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 more difficult to achieve.
“I’m concerned, in general, that the amount of green electricity we need for the transition is not coming as fast as we need it,” Gates said.
“If we try to make a map and say, ‘Let’s get to zero by 2050,’ we think, ‘Maybe another 10 or 15 years is more realistic.’ It is very difficult to predict. We are not going to reach zero in 2050, I don’t think so,” he added.
Gates’ warning came a week after a global report found that despite a record rise in renewable energy in 2023, fossil fuel consumption also rose to a new record as a result of ever-increasing demand.