Artificial Intelligence Is Going to Eat Up a Lot of Electricity

Artificial intelligence has become the tech industry’s shiny new toy, with expectations it’ll revolutionize trillion-dollar industries from retail to medicine. But the creation of every new chatbot and image generator requires a lot of electricity, which means the technology may be responsible for a massive and growing amount of planet-warming carbon emissions.

Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and ChatGPT maker OpenAI use cloud computing that relies on thousands of chips inside servers in massive data centers across the globe to train AI algorithms called models, analyzing data to help them “learn” to perform tasks. The success of ChatGPT has other companies racing to release ...