UNL professor weighs in on growing power demands of artificial intelligence

LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) - With an area being carved out in Lincoln for artificial intelligence at a new Google campus, 10/11 is looking at the growing use of A.I. and what it takes to power the growing technology.

That technology is just a few fish in the tank of what happens at the Schorr Center on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Main Campus. In the basement of the center, there are rows and rows full of graphic processing units. While just a handful of them are used for artificial intelligence, that’s not the case at massive data centers needed by tech giants like Google or Meta.

The Schorr Center’s Byrav Ramamurthy said that’s what’s needed to continue to grow this technology.

“These training algorithms, they use a lot of computational power, they move data around so they need a lot of networking resources. Essentially they are carried out in large data centers, over large-scale computing and networking platforms often spanning the globe,” Ramamurthy said.

That computational power takes electricity. A lot of it.

The International Energy Agency predicts in a recent report, Energy and AI, that electricity demand from data centers worldwide is set to more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours. That’s slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today.

For the U.S., the agency said the economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminum, steel, cement and chemicals.

This growth is coming to Lincoln, too. There’s a new Google data center in the works.

“There are large data centers in many different parts of the world including several locations in the U.S. and even in our state of Nebraska, there are data centers now from several different entities; that’s just going to grow,” Ramamurthy said.

Ramamurthy recognized how this energy demand does take a toll on the environment.

“There are certain approaches like low power electronics, there’s a tendency to consider optical networking, to replace or substantially enhance electronic processing at routers, and also look at other forms of energy. For example, nuclear energy is being considered to power data centers and that of course brings other sorts of problems,” Ramamurthy said.

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