Amazon's Green Plans Face Overwhelming Energy Demands -Media Report

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AI applications are massive energy users, and currently, most electricity, the primary source, is fueled by oil and gas. Under a new plan, Amazon will use its AI-based skills to minimize the electricity driven by fossil fuels by moving quickly to alternative energy. The problem is that the energy industry cannot move fast enough.

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The company wrote: “This AI innovation is becoming more important as climate change makes heat waves hotter and more frequent, stretching power grids to their limits. As the temperature goes up, homes and businesses often turn up their air units to stay cool, placing pressure on grid operators to meet high demand, and the heat simultaneously can lead to reduced output of traditional thermal power plants, risking outages.”

And, “Once launched, the future AI model is expected to offer predictive insights on site performance and energy generation. This task is currently not possible for humans to perform, as it requires manual analysis and monitoring of each Amazon system and building.”

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The devil is in the details. Solar and wind energy adoption has been slower than expected in the US. Much of this concerns the availability of capital, which Amazon does not plan to provide on a scalable basis. An aging infrastructure cannot be replaced rapidly just because AI can identify its problems in a way humans cannot. Physical work remains, and the availability of materials is a gating factor.

Microsoft has set similar plans, but finding areas with renewable electricity is a logistical and regulatory problem.

As Axios writes of the Amazon deal: “But at the end of the day, the coming surge in data center energy demand could still overwhelm such gains.” That is true.