At multiple points this week, I came across different stories and conversations about the same thing: the so-called “gold rush” of land grabbing and real estate boom fueled by the need for land to build data centers for the exploding needs of AI processing:
“Developers are scouring the map for places where electricity is available now — or can be made available faster than somewhere else — where water rights are secure, and where fiber can be brought online without years of delay. The result is a scramble for land that looks less like traditional economic development and more like a competition for raw inputs … land that would once have been considered remote or undesirable is now suddenly valuable — and it’s not because people want to live there, but because machines do.”
As with any gold rush, there are people trying to find a way to get their piece of the pie—with much speculation and financial markets moving toward this trend. The trend line of most of the stories seems to be that the energy needs will double by 2030 (if not earlier) and that this will become an irreversible trend for the future. The solutions for this future that shift that trend are less publicized but much more interesting. For example, MIT published a report on the emerging research into how to reduce energy use and promote more sustainable AI. Chinese startups made the news last year for pioneering an energy efficient AI-chatbot.
The point is, alongside the stories of the land rush and shift towards building even more data centers for even more power-hungry AI applications … we should also actively seek out the stories of the startups who are finding ways to deliver that power in more sustainable and scalable ways.