End-of-year wraps often recap what happened over the last 365 days and make predictions about what will happen over the next 365. In our world at the intersection of energy and AI, we’ve seen enough to know that even the most well-informed predictions can fall short — and, much like a bad email, the world doesn’t need another “what we learned” post. Instead, for our concluding edition of Machine Readable, we’re going to anchor on the state of play in energy right now.
US electricity demand hit its all-time high in 2021, at more than 4,200 terawatt-hours. The US has never used more electricity than it does right now. But, it also uses barely more electricity today than it did fifteen years ago. The previous record year for electricity consumption was all the way back in 2007. To put it another way, US electricity demand was post-growth for most of this century. Even 2022’s record power consumption was less than two percent higher than it was 15 years earlier.
If you care about energy, or technology, the growth in electricity demand from data center operations is inescapable. If you care about both, it is elemental. AI-driven data center demand is a, if not the, main driver of electricity demand growth in many US electricity markets, and is one of the prime movers of global electricity demand growth this decade. The combined capital expenditures to develop AI from the four ‘hyperscalers’ (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft) will exceed $200 billion...
Halcyon believes that building in public is an important part not just of demonstrating technology capabilities, but of developing them as well. We have been sharing elements of our work in public, but most of our efforts to date have been visible only behind a login.
Last week our staff engineer Will Hakim wrote about his learnings from building with artificial intelligence and large language models. One of his most important observations is that AI applications thrive not just based on technology, but from (in his words) understanding a customer’s workflow and fitting AI into it.
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