Microsoft’s under construction datacentre at Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, in July. The company is investing billions in the datacentre and related AI initiatives in the state.Microsoft’s under construction datacentre at Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, in July. The company is investing billions in the datacentre and related AI initiatives in the state.The artificial intelligence boom has driven big tech share prices to fresh highs, but at the cost of the sector’s climate aspirations.
“Energy consumption is not just growing, but Google is also struggling to meet this increased demand from sustainable energy sources,” says Alex de Vries, the founder of Digiconomist, a website monitoring the environmental impact of new technologies. The IEA, the world’s energy watchdog, has warned that even though global renewable energy capacity grew by the fastest pace recorded in the past 20 years in 2023, the world
The largest and most expensive datacentres in the AI sector are those used to train “frontier” AI, systems such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 which are more powerful and capable than any other. The leader in the field has changed over the years, but OpenAI is generally near the top, battling for position with Anthropic, maker of Claude, and Google’s Gemini.