In an interview cited by The Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Rene Has, CEO of Arm, warned of AI's "insatiable" thirst for electricity, stating an increase to as much as 25% of the U.S.' current 4% power grid usage from AI datacenters is possible.
Rene himself may have been citing an International Energy Agency report from January stating that ChatGPT consumes roughly 2.9 watt-hours of electricity per request, which is 10 times as much as a standard Google search. Thus, if Google made the full hardware and software switch with its search engine, Google would consume at least 11 terawatt-hours of electricity per year from its current 1 TWh.
