The Tech Energy Transition

For the Balkinization Symposium on the Global Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence.Amy L. Stein It has been three and a half years since ChatGPT exploded on the scene, and many have yet to wrap their heads around the environmental, economic, and ethical implications of AI’s lifeblood – data centers. Without these sprawling facilities that house thousands of servers and mountains of computational equipment, AI is ineffectual. This makes the physical limitations of AI’s growth much more pronounced that initially anticipated. The true bottleneck for AI development is the energy required to power these data centers, rendering the electric grid ground zero for data center development disputes. These disputes center around the clash of two titans: Big Tech and Big Utilities. While the largest privately-owned electric public utilities (Big Utilities) have dictated the shape of our grid for the last century, Big Tech’s emergence in the grid space has disrupted assumptions, regulatory…