Article by Thijs van de Graaf: “Artificial intelligence is often cast as intangible, a technology that lives in the cloud and thinks in code. The reality is more grounded. Behind every chatbot or image generator lie servers that draw electricity, cooling systems that consume water, chips that rely on fragile supply chains, and minerals dug from the earth.
That physical backbone is rapidly expanding. Data centers are multiplying in number and in size. The largest ones, “hyperscale” centers, have power needs in the tens of megawatts, at the scale of a small city. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta already run hundreds worldwide, but the next wave is far larger, with projects at gigawatt scale. In Abu Dhabi, OpenAI and its partners are planning a 5-gigawatt campus, matching the output of five nuclear reactors and sprawling across 10 square miles.
Economists debate when, if ever, these vast investments will pay off in productivity gains. Even so, governments are treating AI as the new frontier of industrial policy, with initiatives on a scale once reserved for aerospace or nuclear power. The United Arab Emirates appointed the world’s first minister for artificial intelligence in 2017. France has pledged more than €100 billion in AI spending. And in the two countries at the forefront of AI, the race is increasingly geopolitical: The United States has wielded export controls on advanced chips, while China has responded with curbs on sales of key minerals.
The contest in algorithms is just as much a competition for energy, land, water, semiconductors, and minerals. Supplies of electricity and chips will determine how fast the AI revolution moves and which countries and companies will control it…(More)”.
