>Exponential growth, a/k/a constant periodic percentage growth (per day, month, year, etc.), increases rapidly. Differences (or errors) in magnitude measurement disappear rapidly: a factor of two in a single generation, a factor of ten in about three generations, a factor of 100 in less than 7, a factor of one thousand in fewer than 10.
Exponential Growth in datacenters is extremely unlikely.
I doubt it could be sustained for half a generation before Colo became cheaper than air.
>But the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.
If you add "Sustained" in sure, but its unsustainable, leading back to the starting point mattering more than the rate.
Theres not enough RAM for now. You double colo space worldwide, and there's simply not going to be computers to put in there. That's just the canary, there's indicators of other component shortages. But like, pretending this is exponential will quickly burn out other things. Steel. Powder Coat. Fibre.
Not to mention that funding for data center expansion is already drying up and projects are being cancelled. I honestly dont believe in a single local project that isnt branded NextDC or Equinix. Outside of them I wouldnt be surprised if 90% of projects failed to materialise.
I dont know what world you live in where you think theres an exponential Data Centre growth going on but its not this one. We are already up against the wall. I guarantee you will have a new industry you just learned about to get anxious about by 2030. Just how Bitcoin didn't exponentially grow to consume the whole planets energy supply by 2025 as predicted.
Again: the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.
And again: it usually doesn't. Most growth trends follow a sigmoid rather than exponential curve.
You're arguing against points I'm not making.
The point I am making is to keep an eye on the growth trend (and whatever might constrain that, you've given some credible concerns here), rather than the starting magnitude.
The question of how much societal resource information services can plausibly consume over a long term is an interesting one. Looking at biological analogues, the human brain accounts for roughly 25% of our own metabolic output, which I suspect is the present record.[1]
I get 8% for total present use in commercial computing, with the US EIA projecting a pretty steady growth to exceed all refrigeration, lighting, space cooling, and ventilation, by 2050, at about 350% of present levels. It looks as if that analysis presumes a 5% annual growth rate. The full report does incorporate AI in its considerations.
We assume AI servers will increasingly skew more energy intensive, the installed stock of AI servers grows exponentially through at least 2040, and computational efficiency will increase over time. In our High Electricity Demand case, we assume the exponential growth in AI servers will continue through 2050, and the rate of improvement in server computational efficiency will reflect historical trends.
1. Apparently among vertebrates typical metabolic fraction is between 2--8%, though there may be some tree shrews which approach humans as a percentage if not total CNS metabolic magnitude. "Ratio of central nervous system to body metabolism in vertebrates: Its constancy and functional basis" (1981) <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15916066_Ratio_of_c...>.
Socially, our computational energy is on the high side for vertebrate animals.
I don't either, but it's an extant one, and one in which we can collect a fair bit of largely-unbiased data reasonably immune to short-term manias, unlike, say, stock markets or technology hype cycles.
Over about 4 billion years, and under immense selective pressure, maxing out energy expenditure (biology's chief currency) at roughly 25% of the whole to information processing (input, storage, processing, output) seems to afford maximum benefit. It's also quite possible that genus homo's brain size has decreased over the past 200,000 years or so; h. sapiens neanderthalensis had slightly larger brains than modern h sapiens sapiens, though that size may not have been as intellectually or linguistically capable.
The other possibly interesting data series is of the magnitude of impact of information technology on social capabilities given rates of improvement of the former. Robert Solow, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics". Computer capabilities have increased roughly 33 millions-fold since the 1950s, but productivity hasn't followed that same curve. Even looking at information technology spend vs. growth shows limited gains (computer capacity has become vastly cheaper over the same period, the same outlay buys far more capability than financial values would indicate). It seems likely that AI will follow a similar trend.
Though there've also been some marked transitions where capabilities have exceeded some limit or new applications / formats have become possible. Business computing beginning in the late 1950s, small businesses and universities by the 1970s, personal computing by the early 1980s, general networking in the 1990s, mobile devices in the aughts, algorithmic ad-tech / fin-tech / social media in the 2010s, and AI in the 2020s. There've also been capability-based advances including precision machining, automated equipment and systems controls, digital media (audio/video), accounting, navigation controls (marine, air, rail, land), re-usable rockets (largely from the ability to re-land boosters), massive satellite swarms, and LLM / gradient descent / synthetic annealing artificial intelligence. What the net societal and economic impacts will be isn't clear, and a fair bit of that is already clearly negative, as is the question of how those fruits will be distributed.
All of which affect the question of how big AI's energy footprint can grow. Though I'll note again it's growth rate and duration which matter, not present magnitude.
(Hope for clarity and accessibility that's both sufficiently nuanced and insufficiently verbose, though I've my doubts on the last.)
Exponential Growth in datacenters is extremely unlikely.
I doubt it could be sustained for half a generation before Colo became cheaper than air.
>But the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.
If you add "Sustained" in sure, but its unsustainable, leading back to the starting point mattering more than the rate.
Theres not enough RAM for now. You double colo space worldwide, and there's simply not going to be computers to put in there. That's just the canary, there's indicators of other component shortages. But like, pretending this is exponential will quickly burn out other things. Steel. Powder Coat. Fibre.
Not to mention that funding for data center expansion is already drying up and projects are being cancelled. I honestly dont believe in a single local project that isnt branded NextDC or Equinix. Outside of them I wouldnt be surprised if 90% of projects failed to materialise.
I dont know what world you live in where you think theres an exponential Data Centre growth going on but its not this one. We are already up against the wall. I guarantee you will have a new industry you just learned about to get anxious about by 2030. Just how Bitcoin didn't exponentially grow to consume the whole planets energy supply by 2025 as predicted.