"Nearly all leading artificial intelligence developers are focused on building AI models that mimic the way humans reason, but new research shows these cutting-edge systems can be far more energy intensive, adding to concerns about AI's strain on power grids. AI reasoning models used 30 times more power on average to respond to 1,000 written prompts than alternatives without this reasoning capability or which had it disabled, according to a study released Thursday."
"Some models were found to have a much wider disparity in energy consumption, including one from Chinese upstart DeepSeek. A slimmed-down version of DeepSeek's R1 model used just 50 watt hours to respond to the prompts when reasoning was turned off, or about as much power as is needed to run a 50 watt lightbulb for an hour. With the reasoning feature enabled, the same model required 7,626 watt hours to complete the tasks."
"The soaring energy needs of AI have increasingly come under scrutiny. As tech companies race to build more and bigger data centers to support AI, industry watchers have raised concerns about straining power grids and raising energy costs for consumers. A Bloomberg investigation in September found that wholesale electricity prices rose as much as 267% over the past five years in areas near data centers."
AI reasoning models can require dramatically more power than models without reasoning capability. Evaluations of 40 open, freely available models, including software from OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, showed reasoning-enabled models used about 30 times more energy on average to answer 1,000 prompts. Some individual models exhibited far larger gaps; one slimmed-down model consumed 50 watt hours with reasoning disabled but 7,626 watt hours with reasoning enabled. Rapid expansion of data centers to support AI risks straining power grids, raising electricity prices for nearby consumers, and complicating long-term climate and sustainability objectives for major cloud providers.
Read at Fortune
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