AI's Insatiable Appetite for Watts
Let’s be blunt. The AI revolution runs on electricity, and it consumes it in truly biblical quantities. Every time you ask a chatbot to write a poem or plan your holiday, it uses about ten times the power of a simple Google search. Now, multiply that by millions of users and add the colossal energy needed to train these complex models in the first place. You start to see the problem.
Our data centres, the vast, humming warehouses that form the backbone of the internet, are already drinking about 3% of the nation’s entire electricity supply. Experts suggest that figure could easily triple in the next few years. The National Grid, bless its creaking, analogue heart, was designed for a world of kettles and televisions, not for powering digital brains the size of small cities. This, to me, creates a fascinating paradox for investors. The very companies at the centre of this boom are facing an existential threat from their own electricity bills.