{"id":251703,"date":"2025-09-24T18:32:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T18:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/251703\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T18:32:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T18:32:09","slug":"sam-altmans-ai-empire-will-devour-as-much-power-as-new-york-city-and-san-diego-combined-experts-say-its-scary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/251703\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Altman\u2019s AI empire will devour as much power as New York City and San Diego combined. Experts say it’s ‘scary’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Picture New York City on a sweltering summer night: every air conditioner straining, subway cars humming underground, towers blazing with light. Now add San Diego at the peak<\/a> of a record-breaking heat wave, when demand shot past 5,000 megawatts and the grid nearly buckled.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s almost the scale of electricity that Sam Altman and his partners say will be devoured by their next wave of AI data centers\u2014a single corporate project consuming more power, every single day, than two American cities pushed to their breaking point.<\/p>\n

The announcement is a \u201cseminal moment\u201d that Andrew Chien, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, says he has been waiting for a long time to see what\u2019s coming to fruition.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been a computer scientist for 40 years, and for most of that time computing was the tiniest piece of our economy\u2019s power use,\u201d Chien told Fortune. \u201cNow it\u2019s becoming a large share of what the whole economy consumes.\u201d<\/p>\n

He called the shift both exciting and alarming.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s scary because computing was always the tiniest piece of our economy\u2019s power use,\u201d he said. \u201cNow it could be 10% or 12% of the world\u2019s power by 2030. We\u2019re coming to some seminal moments for how we think about AI and its impact on society.\u201d<\/p>\n

This week, OpenAI announced a plan<\/a> with NVIDIA to build AI data centers consuming up to 10 gigawatts of power, with additional projects <\/a>totaling 17 gigawatts already in motion. That\u2019s roughly equivalent to powering New York City\u2014which uses 10 <\/a>gigawatts in the summer\u2014and San Diego during the intensive heat wave of<\/a> 2024, when more than 5 gigawatts were used. Or, as one expert put it, it\u2019s close to the total electricity demand of Switzerland and Portugal combined.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s pretty amazing,\u201d Chien said. \u201cA year-and-a-half ago they were talking about five gigawatts. Now they\u2019ve upped the ante to 10, 15, even 17. There\u2019s an ongoing escalation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fenqi You, an energy systems professor at Cornell University, who also studies AI, agreed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cTen gigawatts is more than the peak power demand in Switzerland or Portugal,\u201d he told Fortune. \u201cSeventeen gigawatts is like powering both countries together.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Texas grid, where Altman broke ground<\/a> on one of the projects this week, typically runs around 80 gigawatts.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cSo you\u2019re talking about an amount of power that\u2019s comparable to 20% of the whole Texas grid,\u201d Chien said. \u201cThat\u2019s for all the other industries\u2014refineries, factories, households. It\u2019s a crazy large amount of power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Altman has framed the build-out as necessary to keep up with AI\u2019s runaway demand.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is what it takes to deliver AI,\u201d he said in Texas. Usage of ChatGPT, he noted, has jumped tenfold in the past 18 months.<\/p>\n

Which energy source does AI need?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Altman has made no secret of his favorite: nuclear. He has backed<\/a> both fission and fusion startups, betting that only reactors can provide the kind of steady, concentrated output needed to keep AI\u2019s insatiable demand fed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cCompute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future,\u201d he said<\/a>, framing nuclear as the backbone of that future.<\/p>\n

Chien, however, is blunt about the near-term limits.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs far as I know, the amount of nuclear power that could be brought on the grid before 2030 is less than a gigawatt,\u201d he said. \u201cSo when you hear 17 gigawatts, the numbers just don\u2019t match up.\u201d<\/p>\n

With projects like OpenAI\u2019s demanding 10 or 17 gigawatts, nuclear is \u201ca ways off, and a slow ramp, even when you get there.\u201d Instead, he expects wind, solar, natural gas, and new storage technologies to dominate.<\/p>\n

Fenqi You, an energy systems expert at Cornell, struck a middle ground. He said nuclear may be unavoidable in the long run if AI keeps expanding, but cautioned that \u201cin the short term, there\u2019s just not that much spare capacity\u201d \u2014 whether fossil, renewable, or nuclear. \u201cHow can we expand this capacity in the short term? That\u2019s not clear,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He also warned that timeline may be unrealistic.<\/p>\n

\u201cA typical nuclear plant takes years to permit and build,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the short term, they\u2019ll have to rely on renewables, natural gas, and maybe retrofitting older plants. Nuclear won\u2019t arrive fast enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Environmental costs\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The environmental costs loom large for these experts, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to face the reality that companies promised they\u2019d be clean and net zero, and in the face of AI growth, they probably can\u2019t be,\u201d Chien said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ecosystems could come under stress, Cornell\u2019s You said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf data centers consume all the local water or disrupt biodiversity, that creates unintended consequences,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The investment figures are staggering. Each OpenAI site is valued at roughly $50 billion, adding up to $850 billion in planned spending. Nvidia<\/a> alone has pledged up to $100 billion to back the expansion, providing millions of its new Vera Rubin GPUs.<\/p>\n

Chien added that we need a broader societal conversation about the looming environmental costs of using that much electricity for AI. Beyond<\/a> carbon emissions, he pointed to hidden strains on water supplies, biodiversity, and local communities near massive data centers. Cooling alone, he noted, can consume vast amounts of fresh water in regions already facing scarcity. And because the hardware churns so quickly \u2014 with new Nvidia processors rolling out every year \u2014 old chips are constantly discarded, creating waste streams laced with toxic chemicals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey told us these data centers were going to be clean and green,\u201d Chien said. \u201cBut in the face of AI growth, I don\u2019t think they can be. Now is the time to hold their feet to the fire.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Picture New York City on a sweltering summer night: every air conditioner straining, subway cars humming underground, towers…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":251704,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,738,1582,276,854,2010,1697,1671,305,59144,33281,923,3549,7264,29392,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,11039],"class_list":{"0":"post-251703","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-clean-energy","13":"tag-jensen-huang","14":"tag-nuclear","15":"tag-nvidia","16":"tag-openai","17":"tag-power-grid","18":"tag-renewables","19":"tag-sam-altman","20":"tag-san-diego","21":"tag-sandiego","22":"tag-solar","23":"tag-united-states","24":"tag-united-states-of-america","25":"tag-unitedstates","26":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","27":"tag-us","28":"tag-usa","29":"tag-wind"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115260708838115708","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/251704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}