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Advanced AI uses 136.5 times more electricity than standard chatbots, study warns
As AI takes on more complex tasks, its hunger for electricity skyrockets, as visualized in this AI-generated image. Courtesy of KAIST
By Lee Kyung-min
The next generation of artificial intelligence could trigger a massive global energy crisis.
A groundbreaking new study by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has quantified the hidden electricity costs of advanced AI agents for the first time. The findings reveal that these autonomous systems consume up to 136.5 times more energy per query than the conventional generative AI tools we use today.
While standard chatbots simply answer a question and stop, AI agents act like digital assistants. Given a goal like planning a vacation or managing a budget, they independently figure out how to do it. To finish the job, the agent will search the internet, make calculations and execute commands entirely on its own.
However, this independence comes at a massive environmental cost.
To complete a complex task, the agent has to talk to itself and rerun its core AI programming over and over again. This continuous looping means answers can take 153.7 times longer to generate. Even worse, expensive computer graphics chips sit completely idle more than half the time, burning electricity while simply waiting for external websites and apps to respond.
The strain on global data centers is immense.
The KAIST research team, led by Rhu Min-soo, found that a single complex request to an AI agent burns through an average of 348.41 watt-hours of electricity. If these agents become mainstream and handle an estimated 13.7 billion requests globally per day, the power grid will not be able to cope. Total data center electricity demand would skyrocket to roughly half of the average energy consumption of the entire United States.
Rhu warned that tech companies cannot just focus on making software smarter if they want a sustainable future. Instead, the tech industry must completely redesign AI models, microchips, and data center power grids from the ground up to handle this massive new workload before the grid collapses.
This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.