😲 🤖 Swelling AI bubble half the problem – energy guzzling the other

Elon Musk’s slip of the tongue laid bare a glaring flaw in AI’s rise: its ravenous appetite for energy to power massive data centers.

“We’re building 500 megawatts, gigawatts... That'll be eight bazillion trillion dollars,” Musk joked at last month’s event for his xAI 500-megawatt data center project with Saudi Arabia.

The AI craze poses more challenges for the US than a mere swear bubble: Can the power grid withstand the surge from new data centers – and at what price?

➡️ US regulators warn that major data centers powering AI and cryptocurrency mining, all tied to the grid, could pose an immediate threat to system reliability.

The urgency is heightened by the fact that the Trump administration declared the AI boom a national security priority, Bloomberg reports.

👌 Perhaps that’s why Trump has doubled down on pushing gasoline cars over electric vehicles. Is the US staring down an impending electricity shortage?