AI's Appetite for Metal
Plus: Synthetic Podcasters Discuss My Real Article; Power Metal Pre-Pub Love; and more about the human and environmental costs of renewable energy and digital technology —and how we can do better.
AI’s Appetite for Metal
Fellow author, newsletterist and pal Alexandra Samuel asked me the other day about the extent to which the AI boom is driving the global rush for critical metals. I didn’t have a great answer for her, but figured I should. So I’ve been doing some research, enough that I can now confidently say that the answer is: a lot!
AI mainly requires metals for two purposes: for the computer chips and associated machinery on which its algorithms run, and, much more significantly, for the energy that powers those chips and machines.
Whenever you use AI—be it for a Gemini-assisted Google search, a question for ChatGPT, or to put doggy ears on your selfie—the computing that makes it all happen is being performed not on your phone or laptop but on specially designed, superpowerful computer chips, housed on racks of servers in a remote data center.
Those chips are made mostly of silicon, but also often include small amounts of gallium and germanium. China, as usual, dominates the global supply of these metals. Then there’s tin, used to solder chips into place on circuit boards. China also produces much of the world’s supply of that humble metal. But about a fifth of the world’s tin comes from Indonesia, especially the island of Bangka, where miners are ravaging the land and its surrounding waters. Copper is also important, used to network chips together, and carry power to them and the other machines that underlie them. A single data center can require more than 2,000 tons of copper for its internal workings. An industry trade group estimates data centers’ copper consumption will jump from just under 200,000 tons in 2020 to nearly 300,000 tons by 2040. On top of all that, other equipment in data centers requires tantalum, rare earths, and other minerals.
All of that direct usage adds up to a significant amount of metals. But it’s small potatoes compared to the quantities that AI eats up indirectly, in the form of the energy infrastructure required to power it. Data centers are notorious energy hogs. A single complex can consume as much power as a small city. All those computers furiously crunching algorithms around the clock require loads of electricity to keep them running. What’s more, they generate a lot of heat, which has to be handled somehow. The main methods are using water to cool things down—which is putting a huge strain on water supplies in some areas—or using air conditioning, which requires yet more electricity.
The energy demand from data centers is surging far faster than just about anybody would have predicted even a few years ago. The International Energy Agency estimates that the overlapping categories of data centers, cryptocurrencies, and artificial intelligence consumed about 2 percent of all the world’s electricity in 2022. The energy demand from AI alone could increase tenfold by 2026, according to the Harvard Business Review, outstripping the annual electricity consumption of Belgium.
Where will all that electricity come from? In many places, from fossil-fuel power plants. “China’s data center industry draws 73 percent of its power from coal, emitting about 99 million tons of CO2 in 2018,” writes Kate Crawford in her book Atlas of AI. In the U.S. and elsewhere, coal plants that had been slated for shutdown are being kept online to meet the voracious appetite of data centers. (Even the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, site of America’s worst nuclear accident, is being brought back to power AI.) In short, AI is generating a hell of a lot of planet-warming emissions.
But let’s get back to metals. Regardless of how electricity is generated, be it from a coal plant, a nuclear reactor, or a solar array, it needs to carried from the place where it originated to the data center where it will be consumed. It is carried by cables, which are mostly made of good old copper. “Several hundred miles of new transmission lines must be built, slicing through neighborhoods and farms in Virginia and three neighboring states” to keep the state’s hundreds of data centers humming, according to the Washington Post. And that’s just one cluster of AI processing. All told, supplying power to the world’s data centers could require 2.6 million tons of copper by 2030.
Any other questions? Happy to do my best to answer any and all. Meanwhile, if you’d like an overview of the issues around copper in particular, check out this next item…
Synthetic Podcasters Discuss My Real Article
I recently posted a summary of an article I wrote for Wired which is based on a chapter in my forthcoming book. Still following me? Well, avid proponent of recycling that I am, I’ve found yet another way to repurpose that material, which is all about the destruction spawned by the global copper rush. Hat tip to my cousin and AI impresario Jeffery Lando, who turned me on to Google’s NotebookLM. It’s a new-ish AI system which allows you to upload any sort of text, and then with the click of a single button, generate a “podcast” in which two convincingly human-sounding hosts do a pretty decent job of discussing that text. They get one or two details wrong, but overall it’s factually accurate. I find this astonishing and terrifying in equal measure. Have a listen for yourself. I’d love to hear what you (or your favorite chatbot) think.
Power Metal Pre-Publication Love
A power quartet of top nonfiction authors—Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Daniel Pink and Adam Grant—included Power Metal in a list of upcoming must-reads for their “Next Big Ideas Club”! I’m guessing that’s at least partly thanks to Daniel, who also graciously blurbed my book, calling it “a must read for anyone who cares about the future of our planet.” Meanwhile, Canada’s top newspaper, the Globe and Mail, also recommended Power Metal as one of the books to read this fall. (The whole list, sadly, is paywalled.) Allow me to remind you that the book comes out November 19, and it would be great if you preorder it! Amazon is currently offering a 10% discount!
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