Summary: The International Energy Agency’s flagship Energy and AI report explains that the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence depends fundamentally on electricity supply — particularly for power-hungry data centres — while AI itself could transform the energy sector by optimizing systems and enhancing efficiency. Data centres today consume significant electricity — comparable to the annual usage of 100,000 households for a typical facility — and the largest future centres under construction may use twenty times more. The report underscores that affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy will be pivotal to AI development, and that policymakers and market participants have so far lacked comprehensive tools to assess this deepening energy-AI nexus.
Source: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/executive-summary