Last month, bitcoin mining company Core Scientific (CORZ) signed a 200 megawatt (MW) artificial intelligence (AI) deal with cloud computing firm CoreWeave, the former agreeing to modify some of its existing infrastructure to host the latter’s GPUs for high performance computing operations. Miners, bitcoiners, and technologists have been talking about the overlap of AI and Bitcoin for a while and this Core-to-Core deal marked the official collision of these two (potentially) over-hyped and over-frothed industries. The union makes perfect sense: Bitcoin miners have built out robust data centers, complete with attractive energy contracts, and as bitcoin mining trends towards lower profitability, providing AI companies with infrastructure is an obvious and straightforward way to bridge the gap (until things get better). That said, just like with Bitcoin, not everyone is totally psyched about AI. And AI detractors have valid concerns: bias, transparency, privacy, safety, validity, and (worst of all) stealing my bad art to make even worse art. But to someone who has at one time or another been in the throes of bitcoin reportage, there’s something very obvious mostly missing from the AI hysteria which was Bitcoin’s political Achilles heel: energy use. AI, if it is to grow as proponents believe it should, will require a lot more energy to power the data centers which make AI possible. Investment bank Goldman Sachs predicted that data centers will use 8% of the U.S.’s total power supply by 2030 (up from 3% in 2022), of which AI is a strong driving force.
Full opinion : Artificial intelligence guzzles more energy than Bitcoin yet it is not crucified like the crypto was.
