Nvidia's Jensen Huang sees possibilities in AI power use
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the 2024 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last week. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang contends that AI's benefits for the power grid and society ultimately will offset its massive energy suck.
Why it matters: AI's rise is fueling fears in the power sector and the climate community about grid reliability and meeting greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets.
Driving the news: The coming growth in electricity use will be offset by the "incredible productivity" that will come from reducing power grid waste, as well as "better energy, better carbon-capture systems, better energy-generating materials," Huang told a small group of reporters Friday on the sidelines of a Bipartisan Policy Center event in Washington.
- Training an AI model is energy-intensive, but it can be used to distribute power more efficiently via smart grids and make computing processes more efficient.
- "It is the most energy efficient way of doing computation," he said. "You save, in the case of many many applications, 100 times, 1,000 times the energy of doing the same work."
Zoom in: Huang is skeptical about drastic power-use projections and thinks it's "very likely that there's double counting" going on.
- The federal government, he said, needs "a better view of what power is actually needed."
- Policymakers should also "make sure that no American companies need to build data centers outside of America for energy reasons," he said.
- On that front, Huang said Microsoft's recent deal with Constellation to bring a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant back online is "terrific."
Yes, but: Power thirst from AI — as well as electrification and new manufacturing — is already causing headaches for utilities in Virginia's data center alley and states with big industrial booms like Georgia.
- That's raising the possibility of new gas power plants and even prolonging the life of coal.
- Google and Microsoft have both seen their climate-warming emissions spike as a result of data center and AI growth.
- Some research also suggests that all this surging growth could cause big energy cost increases for consumers.
Huang said that during a recent White House meeting, Biden administration officials seemed inclined to help tech companies power their data centers and deal with the aging grid.
- "They were very clear ... that they would like to be an ally in helping to eliminate red tape and accelerate the process of permitting," he said.
- While it's not directly involved in that in the same way as Google or Microsoft, Nvidia is the company designing the chips in many AI datacenters.
The big picture: Huang sees the dawn of AI as a new industrial revolution, with inextricable links between energy use and human prosperity.
- "I hope that our country uses more energy. I hope the world uses more energy," he said.
