Louisiana Public Service Commissioners voted four to one to approve Entergy’s three new gas plants to power Meta’s largest-ever data center coming to Northeast Louisiana.
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The 70 football field-sized AI powerhouse in Richland Parish will need around 2,500 megawatts of power. The facility will use roughly three times as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans annually, according to the Alliance for Affordable Energy.

Wasteful, wasteful, wasteful.

The use cases for AI have gone from "cure cancer, invent new concrete" to "fake girlfriend" to "text your wife for you" to "something, like, cool, man."

Heh.

An artificial intelligence data center that would use more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined before expanding to as much as five times that size will be built soon near Cheyenne, according to the city’s mayor.
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this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources...

I wonder how these data centers affect residential electricity prices. As mentioned in a previous post, why is Tennessee in the top 10 states with electricity rate increases?

With the increase in energy costs, residential insurance, and food, will any middle income citizen this new society?

I am being driven slowly insane by this continuing "surprise" about the fact that "AI" can't possibly do what people expect it to do because that is not what it is designed to do. It doesn't know anything! It doesn't reason! It really is just "spicy autocomplete."

...the US Food and Drug Administration, the division of HHS that oversees vast portions of the American pharmaceutical and food system, had unveiled Elsa, an artificial intelligence tool intended to dramatically speed up drug and medical device approvals.
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Six current and former FDA officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal work told CNN that Elsa [AI] can be useful for generating meeting notes and summaries, or email and communique templates.

Oh, and don't say please and thank you when asking AI questions. That just takes up more bandwidth, energy, water to analyze the request.

AI results have taken over my initial Google search results. Can it be turned off? I only want the original content provider search results.

News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools.
Chatbots are replacing Google’s traditional search, devastating traffic for some publishers.

AI search results are theoretically using the content of the original provider of the data. However, there is not payment for using that data. In addition, there is not determination that the AI bot is using the data in a valid manner.

As has been mentioned here previously,

"crypto has a dirty little secret that is very relevant to the real world: it uses a lot of energy. How much energy? Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, currently consumes an estimated 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually — more than the entire country of Argentina, population 45 million.

Now it is becoming known that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also an energy hog.

..."the voracious electricity consumption of artificial intelligence is driving an expansion of fossil fuel use — including delaying the retirement of some coal-fired plants."
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As the tech giants compete in a global AI arms race, a frenzy of data center construction is sweeping the country. Some computing campuses require as much energy as a modest-sized city, turning tech firms that promised to lead the way into a clean energy future into some of the world’s most insatiable guzzlers of power. Their projected energy needs are so huge, some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet them from any source.
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A ChatGPT-powered search, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a search on Google. One large data center complex in Iowa owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent amount of power as 7 million laptops running eight hours every day, based on data shared publicly by the company.

Hmmm... What now? Should the Bitcoin and AI companies be allowed to use so much of our energy resources? Will our electricity rates go up in order to support these efforts?