Goldman Sachs says AI-driven energy demand is in the midst of a sharp rise and is now impacting both power consumption and labor markets.
In a new podcast series about the rise of AI, Goldman Sachs Research’s Brian Singer says the bank has significantly raised its outlook for data center electricity usage.
According to Singer, the energy needs of the AI boom are equivalent to adding a major country to power consumption.
“We are now assuming about 220% global growth in global AI and broader non-AI data center power demand, 2030 versus 2023. We were at 175% before. To put what that means into perspective, that would be like adding another top-10 consuming country to the mix. It would basically mean the number six or so on the list of countries consuming power.
It’s that significant.”
According to Singer, inference is the biggest driver of the upward revision in energy consumption. Inference is the process by which a trained AI model applies its learned patterns to new, unseen data to generate predictions, decisions or content.
“The reasons for the upward revisions which is we’re starting to assume a bit more energy intensity in inference. And I think there’s still a long way that could potentially go, but we generally thought of inference as a much lower energy-intensive period per server, but we’re starting to see that start to change. Some of the other factors that drove the increase were, number one, just the sheer number of servers that are being shipped, and our broader research team’s forecasting more of that.
And then also, we’re starting to see a bit more deployment of your latest gen servers as well, in addition to building more data centers in the world, and so you have the ability to actually have servers turn into power demand.”
In the US, Singer says the AI infrastructure buildout will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
“We think we’re going to need to see 500,000 new jobs in the US alone to be able to source the combination of building the generation that’s needed to supply power to data centers, that’s about 300,000, and then also the grid, the infrastructure that’s required for transmission and distribution, that’s the other 200,000.”
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