Microsoft has been thinking for several months about the possibility of creating its own graphics for its products. AI needs which, with the official launch of Copilot in almost everyone except Europe, is now much higher and will continue to be higher when it becomes available in Europe in early 2024 once it complies with the law on digital markets in the European Union.
According to different estimates, the number of units of the NVIDIA H100 model available at the end of 2023 will be 1.5 million and by 2024 it is estimated that an additional 2 million units will be sold, all aimed at large data centers. This GPU has a maximum power consumption of 700W, which is more than the average for most American homes.
Taking into account the energy consumption of these graphs, we can already find some data centers that have a energy consumption similar to that of countries like Cyprus, a consumption that, as more units are sold, will increase, leaving Cyprus as a mere anecdote.
According to Paul Churnock, Microsoft data center engineer via LinkedIn, with 61% annual utilization of an NVIDIA H100 GPU, by the end of 2024, energy consumption could reach 13,091 GW/h.
If, to the units sold in 2023, we add the sales forecasts for 2024, by the end of next year, the consumption of this graphic model as a whole could exceed the energy consumption of countries such as Syria, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Georgia and Panama, among others (based on 2021 consumption available on Wikipedia).
NVIDIA is working on models superior to the H100, in particular the B100 model, a GPU that will offer better performance which will be associated with greater power consumption, but will allow the energy it consumes to be used to perform the same work than the current H100. … in less time, thus optimizing the performance-consumption ratio.
What is clear is that in the future, energy consumption it’s not going to decrease. The only thing that will be reduced will be the time needed to complete the training processes.
The world revolves around AI
In 2022, artificial intelligence has reached the whole world, although it had already been operational for several years, it was only last year that any user with access to the Internet had the possibility of directly interacting with it to create texts, solve questions, create images. and even videos.
Everything seems to indicate that in the years to come, the world will revolve around Artificial Intelligence. Although it is unlikely that we will encounter a Skynet Terminator in the future, the European Union and the United States are monitoring how this technology is used and how far it can evolve.
