It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all this talk about artificial intelligence (AI) on your social media feed – and hard to know whether to believe the evangelists who worship it like a new god, or just scroll on to hear the more dystopian view. One recent video stood out for me.
In it, Yann LeCun, supposedly one of the godfathers of the AI revolution, notes that all the information sifted by the large language models (LLMs) was still only the equivalent of what a four-year-old child has processed through his or her optical nerves in the first 1,600 waking hours of their life. We are smarter than we think.
We will need those brains to kick into gear because there’s one issue with AI where the laws of physics bring real certainty. If powering the AI revolution trips our planet into runaway climate change, then this faith in technology will deliver nothing but a false idol, full of hubris and naked profiteering, coming at everyone else’s expense.
The issue arises because the data centres that support the large learning models have to be powered up by electricity and then cooled down to work effectively. The source of that power is one of the critical environmental, as well as economic, issues of our time. We need the data centres because the cloud computing they provide is vital for our daily needs. AI could also help us design and operate more efficient electricity and industrial production systems to help tackle climate change. It’s not about whether we say yes or no to AI, but rather whether we can deliver it in a smart, clean and safe way.
At this moment, it’s not looking good. A technology race has taken hold and America is using more gas to power its data centres, while China is burning more coal. The resulting greenhouse gases are likely to double in the next five years, accounting for 1 per cent of global emissions by that time. Any argument about this being a relatively small percentage has to be immediately rebuffed, because if every sector or country says they’re too small to matter, then we’ll just burn up with all the exemption clauses.
It’s not mission impossible. The fibre-optic cables and switching equipment at the heart of these digital systems use the same widely available materials that are also powering the solar revolution. First and foremost, you need sand, in this case to be converted into fibre-optic cables, made mainly of glass. Then you need clean electricity to send pulses of light along the same cables, creating the digital ones and zeros behind every post.
It’s like a new nervous system for the planet. We should design it to be more transparent, interconnected, open sourced and sustainable in every way. Those working in the area could become frontline climate heroes. Ireland could have a real role to play in all of this.
West Dublin and Northern Virginia were the two top global locations for data centres over the last 20 years. They came here in part because the State supported new transatlantic fibre-optic cables, which run through Dublin en route to London and the Continent. This gave companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta the business case for putting their expanding cloud computing operations here, close to their existing European headquarters.
A local industry of specialised contractors started to flourish, building out and operating the centres. They’ve now moved into an export market as development here was paused due to a real shortage of grid and power capacity. Those two issues will be resolved in the next few years and we are at a critical juncture where we have to decide what this future power system looks like.
The first rule should be to not burn any more imported gas. Instead, we should follow Bord na Móna’s lead by co-locating new data centres in energy parks with secure grid connections, renewable power, battery storage, variable demand management, back-up generators running on hydrogenated vegetable oil and neighbouring industrial processing units, which can use the waste heat.
Because the LLMs are more tolerant to any latency in fibre-optic speeds, the centres could be located closer to our incoming large-scale renewable power supplies. That should reduce the need for spending on the electricity grid, but also see us investing more in the north, south and west – and not just the east coast.
It is not easy to get these cleaner data centres down to zero emissions, but 95 per cent of it can be reached at a relatively low cost. In the process of doing, we will learn how to get to that last 5 per cent. That will give us an industrial skill the rest of the world is going to want in the coming years – using Irish intelligence, backed up by AI.
