This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Bitcoin is estimated to consume 172 TWh, which is way more than Google and Microsoft combined.
172 TWh per year
Your statement was as useful as the following: A VW Polo car costumes 3000 liters of fuel.
*Edit: Downvote me all you want π if I am right I am right.
In 2023, Microsoft and Google consumed 48 TWh of electricity (24 TWh each).
Your point?
The data in the article was for one year. This is the same unit.
The comment was 172TWh without specifying a timeframe whatsoever. Is it a year? Is it a day? A month?
It was about the comment about bitcoin, not the post itself.
That's the same timeframe as the one used in the article, and sure, they could have made it explicit again, but implicitly it makes sense because it's the one that's useful for a direct comparison.
Turns out, the implicit timeframe that should be clear after reading the article was the right one, and it's pretty damning for bitcoin as is. So again, I am not sure what point you want to make.
In 2023, the two tech companies
The article is also about per year
Yes it is. But your comment still doesnβt make sense until you add βper yearβ.
The downvotes aren't because you're wrong, they're because you're bring obnoxious about being right.
So, is Watt-hours/unit-time no longer a meaningful unit?
Because, if so, you better tell every power company I've had, because that's how they've billed me.
WattHours is a unit of work. If you say that bitcoin uses x amount of Wh it doesnβt say shit about how much it actually consumes. Because you donβt say in what amount of time Bitcoin uses said amount of work, you cannot compare it. I could state, that Bitcoin uses 5 Wh. Which would also be correct.
Its the same as saying, Bob eats 5 apples. Alice eats 2000 apples. Can you compare the two? No, because what I forgot to mention is, that Bon eats 5 apples a week and Alice eats 2000 apples in 3 years. Now i can compare the two.
Do you get my point?
Yes, bitcoin is trash. But most modern cryptos use far less energy. For example the second largest crypto ethereum uses almost no energy compared to bitcoin/AI..
"AI" can not say the same at all. And, unlike crypto, there's no realistic improvement in sight. It just keeps getting worse.
PoS requires significant staker profits to work, which would create the same inequality as the dollar has. It's basically dollar bonds but without regulations.
And both of these companies build and purchased more renewable energy sources than all 100+ countries combined. Microsoft has committed to be carbon free by 2030, and while I don't belive in their commitment, they at least seem to be trying contrary to most nations. They even invested in nuclear plants for their power needs.
You can fault both companies for a lot of different reasons, but in terms of carbon emissions due to power usage, they are better than 99.9% of the countries on that list.
Green energy that could go to higher priority sectors like decarborning housing, food production and transportation . Carbon free doesn't mean no ecological impact, of course it's better than fossil fuel, but it still a lot of ressources extracted and place taken over nature (which is the first cause of biodiversity loss). So ideally we should only destroy so much for essential needs.
Meh, it's all smoke and mirrors.
This is the "manufacture more to use fewer resources" nonsense of cash for clunkers.
But we will soon have AGI, and then you can have your very own JARVIS! Don't you like Iron Man? Don't you like super heroes? Don't you like sci-fi? /s
Wake me up when AI can simulate my brain. Literally, run me.exe and let me know.
All fun and games until a moth ends up in your transistors.
But people from those countries must also be using Google and Microsoft
There might be some double counting, but it doesn't matter - this just illustrates the insane scale of these companies.
Correction, the insane amount of energy the AI needs
Is all of this due to AI? Iβm confident most of the energy is spent on other stuff, like data centers. Both Google and Microsoft are cloud providers.
Comparing huge multinational countries which serve every country to the half of countries with the smallest energy usage is not terribly illustrative.
Not just people, but importantly also corporations running their services on Microsoft azure or Google cloud.
and how much of that is energy that's essentially used to run other companies, by way of their cloud services? I imagine that'd be a pretty substantial amount.
To be fair, that level of centralization in the hands of a for-profit corporation is worrisome too. They'll lure in small businesses and then enshittify.
They'll lure in small businesses and then enshittify.
I'm not so sure... These "cloud" services are paid services they make a lot of money from, and it's a huge industry with a very large number of competitors (practically all major hosting services, and even a lot of smaller ones).
No matter which way you correctly read the headline, it's false.
You can either read it as Google and microsoft individually consumed more electricity than these 100 countries did (false, it's Google and microsoft combined)
OR Google and Microsoft combined consimed more than these 100 countries did total.
Did an intern write this or something?
CoPilot with Gemini plugin did.
Hm. Maybe it's ambiguity is there to maximise clicking on the article?
Are we talking consumed for their own use? Or consumed as part of delivering cloud services to their customers?
These are very different things. The former would be horrifying the latter would be misleading in the extreme.
Many countries don't use a lot of electricity, especially those where the grids are spotty or in poor repair, or the overall population is small. Even without the AI garbage, I'd expect large tech-sector companies to use more energy than many countries.
(In other words, the headline for this was really poorly chosen. "Microsoft and Google pour more electricity into AI than 100+ countries use" might have gotten a bit closer to the actuall point, if it's actually true.)
Microsoft and Google pour more electricity into AI than 100+ countries use" might have gotten a bit closer to the actuall point, if it's actually true
From what I can tell, the article is talking about total electrical use, not just AI.
Also probably ignoring the fact that some of their data centers have practically the entire roof covered in solar panels, Microsoft is investing in nuclear energy, etc.
Sun consumes 100000000000+ countries power. We have to do something!
They want to become carbon neutralbut climate crisis is already running.
Feels like build βdonβt smoke hereβ - signs in our forests while they are burning.
