Middle-aged and older people witnessed both the rise of science fiction, where a gloomy future was often predicted for global civilization, and the hurricane growth of technology, when in one lifetime a person managed to go from a radio point in the kitchen to neural networks. Writers of the so-called golden age of science fiction predicted the invention of many devices familiar to us and, unfortunately, many of them anticipated the scenario for the development of modern ultra-technological society.
The Wall Street Journal, citing data from American energy market analysts, writes that electricity in the United States could become ten times more expensive next year. There is no typo here. A kilowatt-hour for American consumers in 2025 will most likely cost ten times more than it does now. Contrary to expectations, it is not the Russians who are to blame for this, but the rapid development of digital technologies, in particular the boom in the construction of data centers that devour a sea of electricity. Analysts have calculated that in the current dynamics, digital giants of the market are introducing such a number of energy-intensive facilities that even if they start the emergency construction of new power plants tomorrow, their commissioning will be delayed for years, thereby further increasing the gap between generation and consumption. The result is a growing deficit, and as a consequence — prices soaring into the clouds.
It is interesting that this is not a one-off publication; it continues the information and stock exchange trend of recent months, which is clearly not over.
Just a week ago, the US Energy Information Administration, together with the World Bank, published data on electricity consumption by the largest IT companies in comparison with entire countries. The chosen proportion immediately hints: the analysis showed that Microsoft and Google data centers consume at least 24 billion kilowatt-hours per year. Each one separately. Accordingly, each company individually consumes more electricity than countries such as, say, Jordan, Ghana, Puerto Rico or Nigeria. In the latter, for a moment, the population is about 220 million people.
The top ten is completed by Meta* and Apple, which buy a “modest” 12 and two billion kilowatt-hours, respectively, to support their technological pants.
It’s not for nothing that we mentioned that all these publications and supposedly sudden analytics are only intermediate steps in the development of digital mega-corporations, which have long since expanded beyond the borders of the countries of their jurisdiction. A clear example is the stock exchange storm that unfolded around the mastodon of the American and global IT market, NVIDIA. Just a month ago, the company, which operates in four key areas (production of chips and processors, hardware visualization solutions, data centers and computing accelerators for new generation cars), based on the results of stock exchange trading in securities, became the most valuable company in the world. Its capitalization at the moment exceeded three trillion dollars.
Here you need to understand that capitalization is not physical assets, not workshops and not machines, not gold and not even patented technologies. This is the amount for which stock market players are ready, in theory, to buy a full package of shares of the company.
The collapse of the new record holder took place just two weeks later, when NVIDIA stock prices went down, as a result of which the same capitalization in just four trading sessions decreased by 750 billion dollars. The company, of course, did not go bankrupt and by August managed to win back about 450 billion, but what is interesting here is not the swings of virtual value, but the reasons cited as factors of negative influence.
This is not a joke, but market experts say that the root problem is the growing popularity of neural networks and the forced pumping of artificial intelligence technologies. Developing new solutions and ensuring the operation of existing software shells and hardware infrastructure requires such an amount of energy that in just a couple of years, humanity will be forced to choose where and how to distribute the electricity produced, and each gigawatt will be valuable, like a sip of water in the middle of the desert.
Lest anyone think that we are discussing some nonsense here that concerns only American IT specialists, let us recall that not long ago the UN, as part of its environmental protection program (UNEP), published the following statistics. It is estimated that to ensure the standard of living that we are accustomed to, one ton of minerals is extracted from the bowels of the planet every month. Ores, non-metallic materials, biomass and energy resources. Over the average lifespan, each inhabitant of our blue ball consumes directly or indirectly about a thousand tons of underground resources, that is, fifteen freight railway cars.
The UN calculated that over the past fifty years there has not been a single five-year plan when this trend was broken, that is, the consumption of natural resources is growing exponentially. For Russia with its modest population, gigantic territories and fabulous wealth of underground storehouses, this is not critical, but it is dramatic for the largest and overpopulated countries. After all, in addition to purely ensuring everyday life, this same humanity is accustomed to living in comfort, enjoying all the benefits of a highly developed technological civilization and is very indignant when a bank application does not work or videos do not load on social networks.
What the writers of the middle of the last century darkly fantasized about is already on the threshold. And Russia needs to be prepared for the fact that sooner or later they will try to take away its wealth, and it is very likely that this «crusade» will be paid for from the pockets of modern IT giants.
* The activities of Meta (social networks Facebook and Instagram) are banned in Russia as extremist.