Latest news with #Digiconomist
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Authorities make disturbing discovery after raiding hundreds of homes driving up utility bills: 'Posing a direct threat to public safety'
Kuwaiti authorities have begun to crack down on unauthorized crypto mining, and a recent raid in the southern Al-Wafrah region led to a 55% drop in local power use within a week, according to Reuters. The enforcement efforts come as the oil-rich nation faces mounting blackouts and extreme pressure on its electrical grid. While crypto trading itself is banned in Kuwait, mining has not been explicitly outlawed, per the report. This is a loophole that miners exploited. Officials say they raided nearly 100 homes under suspicion of mining crypto, and some were using more than 20 times the energy of a typical Kuwaiti household. The country's worsening energy crisis is driven by rapid population growth, rising temperatures, and delayed maintenance at power plants, per Reuters. With summer heat spiking demand for cooling systems, authorities say crypto mining is pushing the grid to its limits. "It only takes a very small share of the total bitcoin mining network to have a significant impact on the relatively small total electricity consumption of Kuwait," Digiconomist founder Alex de Vries-Gai told Reuters. Kuwait's interior ministry said crypto mining constitutes an "unlawful exploitation of electrical power" that "may cause outages affecting residential, commercial and service areas, posing a direct threat to public safety." The environmental cost of crypto can also be steep. A single Bitcoin transaction uses more than 1,189 kilowatt-hours of electricity — about as much as the average U.S. household in 41 days, according to Digiconomist. Globally, over 65% of crypto mining runs on dirty fuels, according to U.N. researchers. While cleaner sources may make up more of the energy mix since the time of the 2023 report, it is clear that crypto is adding significant volumes of heat-trapping pollution into the atmosphere and worsening air quality as a result. Even when power comes from renewables, the grid can experience strain if there's not enough generated to support energy-intensive operations. Because of this, some companies are focused on developing cryptocurrencies that require less power. Online internet users supported the crackdown in Kuwait. "Finally — a sane decision," one Reddit commenter wrote. Do you think America has a plastic waste problem? Definitely Only in some areas Not really I'm not sure Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
The Verge
4 days ago
- Business
- The Verge
AI could consume more power than Bitcoin by the end of 2025
AI could soon surpass Bitcoin mining in energy consumption, according to a new analysis that concludes artificial intelligence could use close to half of all the electricity consumed by data centers globally by the end of 2025. The estimates come from Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies who has tracked cryptocurrencies' electricity consumption and environmental impact in previous research and on his website Digiconomist. He published his latest commentary on AI's growing electricity demand last week in the journal Joule. AI already accounts for up to a fifth of the electricity that data centers use, according to de Vries-Gao. It's a tricky number to pin down without big tech companies sharing data specifically on how much energy their AI models consume. De Vries-Gao had to make projections based on the supply chain for specialized computer chips used for AI. He and other researchers trying to understand AI's energy consumption have found, however, that its appetite is growing despite efficiency gains — and at a fast enough clip to warrant more scrutiny. 'Oh boy, here we go.' With alternative cryptocurrencies to Bitcoin — namely Ethereum — moving to less energy-intensive technologies, de Vries-Gao says he figured he was about to hang up his hat. And then 'ChatGPT happened,' he tells The Verge. 'I was like, Oh boy, here we go. This is another usually energy-intensive technology, especially in extremely competitive markets.' There are a couple key parallels he sees. First is a mindset of 'bigger is better.' 'We see these big tech [companies] constantly boosting the size of their models, trying to have the very best model out there, but in the meanwhile, of course, also boosting the resource demands of those models,' he says. That chase has led to a boom in new data centers for AI, particularly in the US, where there are more data centers than in any other country. Energy companies plan to build out new gas-fired power plants and nuclear reactors to meet growing electricity demand from AI. Sudden spikes in electricity demand can stress power grids and derail efforts to switch to cleaner sources of energy, problems similarly posed by new crypto mines that are essentially like data centers used to validate blockchain transactions. The other parallel de Vries-Gao sees with his previous work on crypto mining is how hard it can be to suss out how much energy these technologies are actually using and their environmental impact. To be sure, many major tech companies developing AI tools have set climate goals and include their greenhouse gas emissions in annual sustainability reports. That's how we know that both Google 's and Microsoft 's carbon footprints have grown in recent years as they focus on AI. But companies usually don't break down the data to show what's attributable to AI specifically. To figure this out, de Vries-Gao used what he calls a 'triangulation' technique. He turned to publicly available device details, analyst estimates, and companies' earnings calls to estimate hardware production for AI and how much energy that hardware will likely use. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which fabricates AI chips for other companies including Nvidia and AMD, saw its production capacity for packaged chips used for AI more than double between 2023 and 2024. After calculating how much specialized AI equipment can be produced, de Vries-Gao compared that to information about how much electricity these devices consume. Last year, they likely burned through as much electricity as de Vries-Gao's home country of the Netherlands, he found. He expects that number to grow closer to a country as large as the UK by the end of 2025, with power demand for AI reaching 23GW. Last week, a separate report from consulting firm ICF forecasts a 25 percent rise in electricity demand in the US by the end of the decade thanks in large part to AI, traditional data centers, and Bitcoin mining. It's still really hard to make blanket predictions about AI's energy consumption and the resulting environmental impact — a point laid out clearly in a deeply reported article published in MIT Technology Review last week with support from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. A person using AI tools to promote a fundraiser might create nearly twice as much carbon pollution if their queries were answered by data centers in West Virginia than in California, as an example. Energy intensity and emissions depend on a range of factors including the types of queries made, the size of the models answering those queries, and the share of renewables and fossil fuels on the local power grid feeding the data center. It's a mystery that could be solved if tech companies were more transparent It's a mystery that could be solved if tech companies were more transparent about AI in their sustainability reporting. 'The crazy amount of steps that you have to go through to be able to put any number at all on this, I think this is really absurd,' de Vries-Gao says. 'It shouldn't be this ridiculously hard. But sadly, it is.' Looking further into the future, there's even more uncertainty when it comes to whether energy efficiency gains will eventually flatten out electricity demand. DeepSeek made a splash earlier this year when it said that its AI model could use a fraction of the electricity that Meta's Llama 3.1 model does — raising questions about whether tech companies really need to be such energy hogs in order to make advances in AI. The question is whether they'll prioritize building more efficient models and abandon the 'bigger is better' approach of simply throwing more data and computing power at their AI ambitions. When Ethereum transitioned to a far more energy efficient strategy for validating transactions than Bitcoin mining, its electricity consumption suddenly dropped by 99.988 percent. Environmental advocates have pressured other blockchain networks to follow suit. But others — namely Bitcoin miners — are reluctant to abandon investments they've already made in existing hardware (nor give up other ideological arguments for sticking with old habits). There's also the risk of Jevons paradox with AI, that more efficient models will still gobble up increasing amounts of electricity because people just start to use the technology more. Either way, it'll be hard to manage the issue without measuring it first.
WIRED
22-05-2025
- Business
- WIRED
AI Is Eating Data Center Power Demand—and It's Only Getting Worse
May 22, 2025 2:09 PM A new analysis of AI hardware being produced and how it is being used attempts to estimate the vast amount of electricity being consumed by AI. Photograph: halbergman/ Getty Images AI's energy use already represents as much as 20 percent of global data-center power demand, research published Thursday in the journal Joule shows. That demand from AI, the research states, could double by the end of this year, comprising nearly half of all total data-center electricity consumption worldwide, excluding the electricity used for bitcoin mining. The new research is published in a commentary by Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, a research company that evaluates the environmental impact of technology. De Vries-Gao started Digiconomist in the late 2010s to explore the impact of bitcoin mining, another extremely energy-intensive activity, would have on the environment. Looking at AI, he says, has grown more urgent over the past few years because of the widespread adoption of ChatGPT and other large language models that use massive amounts of energy. According to his research, worldwide AI energy demand is now set to surpass demand from bitcoin mining by the end of this year. 'The money that bitcoin miners had to get to where they are today is peanuts compared to the money that Google and Microsoft and all these big tech companies are pouring in [to AI],' he says. 'This is just escalating a lot faster, and it's a much bigger threat.' The development of AI is already having an impact on Big Tech's climate goals. Tech giants have acknowledged in recent sustainability reports that AI is largely responsible for driving up their energy use. Google's greenhouse gas emissions, for instance, have increased 48 percent since 2019, complicating the company's goals of reaching net zero by 2030. 'As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute,' Google's 2024 sustainability report reads. Last month, the International Energy Agency released a report finding that data centers made up 1.5 percent of global energy use in 2024—around 415 terrawatt-hours, a little less than the yearly energy demand of Saudi Arabia. This number is only set to get bigger: Data centers' electricity consumption has grown four times faster than overall consumption in recent years, while the amount of investment in data centers has nearly doubled since 2022, driven largely by massive expansions to account for new AI capacity. Overall, the IEA predicted that data center electricity consumption will grow to more than 900 TWh by the end of the decade. But there's still a lot of unknowns about the share that AI, specifically, takes up in that current configuration of electricity use by data centers. Data centers power a variety of services—like hosting cloud services and providing online infrastructure—that aren't necessarily linked to the energy-intensive activities of AI. Tech companies, meanwhile, largely keep the energy expenditure of their software and hardware private. Some attempts to quantify AI's energy consumption have started from the user side: calculating the amount of electricity that goes into a single ChatGPT search, for instance. De Vries-Gao decided to look, instead, at the supply chain, starting from the production side to get a more global picture. The high computing demands of AI, De Vries-Gao says, creates a natural 'bottleneck' in the current global supply chain around AI hardware, particularly around the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the undisputed leader in producing key hardware that can handle these needs. Companies like Nvidia outsource the production of their chips to TSMC, which also produces chips for other companies like Google and AMD. (Both TSMC and Nvidia declined to comment for this article.) De Vries-Gao used analyst estimates, earnings call transcripts, and device details to put together an approximate estimate of TSMC's production capacity. He then looked at publicly available electricity consumption profiles of AI hardware and estimates on utilization rates of that hardware—which can vary based on what it's being used for—to arrive at a rough figure of just how much of global data-center demand is taken up by AI. De Vries-Gao calculates that without increased production, AI will consume up to 82 terrawatt-hours of electricity this year—roughly around the same as the annual electricity consumption of a country like Switzerland. If production capacity for AI hardware doubles this year, as analysts have projected it will, demand could increase at a similar rate, representing almost half of all data center demand by the end of the year. Despite the amount of publicly available information used in the paper, a lot of what De Vries-Gao is doing is peering into a black box: We simply don't know certain factors that affect AI's energy consumption, like the utilization rates of every piece of AI hardware in the world or what machine learning activities they're being used for, let alone how the industry might develop in the future. Sasha Luccioni, an AI and energy researcher and the climate lead at open-source machine-learning platform Hugging Face, cautioned about leaning too hard on some of the conclusions of the new paper, given the amount of unknowns at play. Luccioni, who was not involved in this research, says that when it comes to truly calculating AI's energy use, disclosure from tech giants is crucial. 'It's because we don't have the information that [researchers] have to do this,' she says. 'That's why the error bar is so huge.' And tech companies do keep this information. In 2022, Google published a paper on machine learning and electricity use, noting that machine learning was '10%–15% of Google's total energy use' from 2019 to 2021, and predicted that with best practices, 'by 2030 total carbon emissions from training will reduce.' However, since that paper—which was released before Google Gemini's debut in 2023—Google has not provided any more detailed information about how much electricity ML uses. (Google declined to comment for this story.) 'You really have to deep-dive into the semiconductor supply chain to be able to make any sensible statement about the energy demand of AI,' De Vries-Gao says. 'If these big tech companies were just publishing the same information that Google was publishing three years ago, we would have a pretty good indicator' of AI's energy use.
Zawya
01-05-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Kuwait cracks down on cryptocurrency mining amid power crisis
Kuwait has launched a crackdown on cryptocurrency miners it accuses of being a "major" cause of a power crisis that has led to blackouts, as authorities seek to ease pressure on the grid before the start of a sweltering summer. Authorities started a "wide-ranging" security operation last week, the interior ministry said in a statement, targeting homes used for cryptocurrency mining, an activity it said was illegal. Crypto mining activities "constitute an unlawful exploitation of electrical power … and may cause outages affecting residential, commercial and service areas, posing a direct threat to public safety", the ministry said. Kuwait has banned cryptocurrency trading but has no laws specifically addressing mining. OPEC member Kuwait is grappling with a severe power crisis driven by population growth, urban expansion, rising temperatures and delayed maintenance at some plants. Electricity in the country is extremely cheap and the government has urged residents not to waste it as the need to keep cool amid sweltering summer temperatures heaps pressure on a strained electrical grid. Cryptocurrency mining, although a major cause of the power crisis, is not the only factor, a source at the electricity ministry told Reuters. Mining for crypto uses vast amounts of computing power and has prompted authorities from Kosovo to Russia to curb its use to prevent electricity shortages. The miners tend to base themselves where power is cheap, and often in colder climes where it is easier to cool their servers. Researchers at the University of Cambridge estimated that in 2022, Kuwait was responsible for just 0.05% of the world's bitcoin mining at the time. While there is no good data on how much power crypto miners use in Kuwait, "it only takes a very small share of the total bitcoin mining network to have significant impact on the relatively small total electricity consumption of Kuwait," said Alex de Vries-Gao, founder of Digiconomist, a research project tracking crypto's energy use. Kuwait's crackdown has targeted homes in Al-Wafrah, Kuwait's southernmost area, where the electricity ministry has previously said around 100 homes were used for mining, some of them consuming up to 20 times normal electricity levels. Energy consumption in Al-Wafrah fell by 55% following last week's operation, the electricity ministry said in a statement on Saturday. "They saw government subsidies, saw the absence of oversight, and saw no laws in place, so they exploited the situation to their benefit," said Saud Al-Zaid, who formerly served as executive board member of the Communications and Information Technology Regulatory Authority in Kuwait. Kuwait's central bank has warned against investing in crypto. The country's approach to the sector differs to that of some of its neighbours which have embraced the industry. Dubai this week is playing host to a large crypto event, with Eric Trump, U.S. President Donald Trump's son, among those in attendance. (Reporting by Ahmed Hagagy; Additional reporting by Elizabeth Howcroft; Writing by Yousef Saba; Editing by Tommy Reggiori Wilkes and Freya Whitworth)
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Kuwait cracks down on cryptocurrency mining amid power crisis
By Ahmed Hagagy KUWAIT (Reuters) -Kuwait has launched a crackdown on cryptocurrency miners it accuses of being a "major" cause of a power crisis that has led to blackouts, as authorities seek to ease pressure on the grid before the start of a sweltering summer. Authorities started a "wide-ranging" security operation last week, the interior ministry said in a statement, targeting homes used for cryptocurrency mining, an activity it said was illegal. Crypto mining activities "constitute an unlawful exploitation of electrical power … and may cause outages affecting residential, commercial and service areas, posing a direct threat to public safety", the ministry said. Kuwait has banned cryptocurrency trading but has no laws specifically addressing mining. OPEC member Kuwait is grappling with a severe power crisis driven by population growth, urban expansion, rising temperatures and delayed maintenance at some plants. Electricity in the country is extremely cheap and the government has urged residents not to waste it as the need to keep cool amid sweltering summer temperatures heaps pressure on a strained electrical grid. Cryptocurrency mining, although a major cause of the power crisis, is not the only factor, a source at the electricity ministry told Reuters. Mining for crypto uses vast amounts of computing power and has prompted authorities from Kosovo to Russia to curb its use to prevent electricity shortages. The miners tend to base themselves where power is cheap, and often in colder climes where it is easier to cool their servers. Researchers at the University of Cambridge estimated that in 2022, Kuwait was responsible for just 0.05% of the world's bitcoin mining at the time. While there is no good data on how much power crypto miners use in Kuwait, "it only takes a very small share of the total bitcoin mining network to have significant impact on the relatively small total electricity consumption of Kuwait," said Alex de Vries-Gao, founder of Digiconomist, a research project tracking crypto's energy use. Kuwait's crackdown has targeted homes in Al-Wafrah, Kuwait's southernmost area, where the electricity ministry has previously said around 100 homes were used for mining, some of them consuming up to 20 times normal electricity levels. Energy consumption in Al-Wafrah fell by 55% following last week's operation, the electricity ministry said in a statement on Saturday. "They saw government subsidies, saw the absence of oversight, and saw no laws in place, so they exploited the situation to their benefit," said Saud Al-Zaid, who formerly served as executive board member of the Communications and Information Technology Regulatory Authority in Kuwait. Kuwait's central bank has warned against investing in crypto. The country's approach to the sector differs to that of some of its neighbours which have embraced the industry. Dubai this week is playing host to a large crypto event, with Eric Trump, U.S. President Donald Trump's son, among those in attendance.
