Why doomsday warnings are not the only threat to the AI juggernaut
The global AI race is being hit by very localised political and environmental concerns
There is an eerie low hum that emanates from data centres, where tens of thousands of chips make trillions of computations a second to help drive the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution.
These chips power the text, images and video generated by the queries made by the world of the advanced AI models.
Their computations, which are in effect the switching on and off of microscopic silicon transistors that make up a chip, are actually silent. But, as with all computers, almost every watt of the significant electricity powering this process leaves as heat, and the sound you can hear is the slow whir of thousands of fans required to prevent the heat from frying the racks of servers. Depending on the size of the site, you may also hear the thrum of transformers in substations channelling electricity.
Asking local people to accept the sound, the all night security lighting and the pressure on energy and water supplies in their areas as being for the good of the country is one thing. But it's a harder sell when the AI firms are on the cusp of trillion-dollar-plus valuations but are also expecting massive job losses, and many are asking whether the technology could wipe humans off the face of the Earth.