Artificial Intelligence’s ‘Insatiable’ Energy Needs Not Sustainable, Arm CEO Says
AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT “are just insatiable in terms of their thirst” for electricity, Haas said
TOKYO—Chip-design company Arm ARM 3.55%increase; green up pointing triangle made its name by devising ways to minimize smartphones’ power consumption and extend battery life. Now, the company’s head says the same push for energy efficiency is needed in artificial-intelligence applications.
Rene Haas, chief executive of Arm, spoke ahead of an announcement Tuesday by the U.S. and Japan about a $110 million program to fund AI research at universities in the two countries. U.K.-based Arm and its parent, Tokyo-based SoftBank Group, are together offering $25 million in funding for the program.
AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT “are just insatiable in terms of their thirst” for electricity, Haas said in an interview. “The more information they gather, the smarter they are, but the more information they gather to get smarter, the more power it takes.”
Without greater efficiency, “by the end of the decade, AI data centers could consume as much as 20% to 25% of U.S. power requirements. Today that’s probably 4% or less,” he said. “That’s hardly very sustainable, to be honest with you.”
The power issue has drawn growing attention from technology executives in recent months and helped drive up the stock prices of companies that own and operate electric-power plants.
In a January report, the International Energy Agency said a request to ChatGPT requires 2.9 watt-hours of electricity on average—equivalent to turning on a 60-watt lightbulb for just under three minutes. That is nearly 10 times as much as the average Google search. The agency said power demand by the AI industry is expected to grow by at least 10 times between 2023 and 2026.
“It’s going to be difficult to accelerate the breakthroughs that we need if the power requirements for these large data centers for people to do research on keeps going up and up and up,” Haas said.
He expressed hope that the U.S.-Japan research partnership would work on solutions to the power issue. Arm’s funding is going to a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Keio University in Japan.
The partnership is a project of the U.S. ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, who last year organized a $150 million U.S.-Japan research program in quantum computing backed by IBM and Google. Elsewhere in the AI partnership, Amazon.com and Nvidia are set to spend $25 million each to support AI research at the University of Washington and Japan’s University of Tsukuba.
Emanuel said it was important for the two allies to work together in the face of competing AI and quantum-computing research in China. He said the U.S. and Japan would harness the efforts of industry and academia together, contrasting that with Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s moves in recent years to rein in the country’s tech giants.
“One of the downsides of what Xi has done is squash entrepreneurship,” Emanuel said. “Our model is going to be more successful.”