GAI placed five times greater demand on data servers than standard search engines according to Sarah Myers West, Managing Director of the research group, the AI Now Institute. According to an October 2023 article appearing in Scientific American, the demand for AI on servers noted that data centre electricity use to date was accounting for up to 1.5% of global demand. That was then, but GAI capacity adoption trends show significant growth in AI server unit demand with as many as 1.5 million units shipping per year by 2027 from just one vendor, NVIDIA alone. By 2027, the addition of 1.5 million servers running at full capacity will require energy producers to generate 85.4 Terawatt-hours of electricity annually. In the October Scientific American article, it notes that this would be more energy “than what many small countries use in a year.”
AI machine learning is already being used for real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance in existing nuclear power plants. It doesn’t replace human analysis but enhances operator responses by spotting minor problems that may not be detectable by just monitoring gauges and reading printouts.
AI combined with a digital twin running in parallel with an existing plant represents another performance enhancement. And then there is AI combined with robotics to be used for maintenance and inspection in areas of a power plant that would put human crews at undue risk.
