We are turning energy into non-biological Intelligence. Data centers are literally 'factories' that produce Intelligence. Electricity is the essential input. The electricity powers computation, and the computation produces and processes the tokens through which machine Intelligence operates. As these systems become more capable and autonomous, they consume vastly more... tokens, driving ever greater demand for computation and electricity. OpenRouter estimates that an agentic request already consumes around 15 times as many tokens as a human-led request on its platform. This fundamentally changes the nature of electricity demand as our demand for useful Intelligence has no obvious ceiling. If more computation can produce more valuable work, we will keep finding more work for machines to do - and so, we will need ever more electricity. We got future energy demand so wrong because we did not foresee that non-biological Intelligence could be produced industrially; and that we would need an entirely new energy paradigm to support that.show more

Now try to imagine how this looks from the perspective of democratic nations who lack their own sovereign models.

And energy.

Well, quite. It becomes easy to understand that this rapidly mutates into a security issue.

AI is going to drive a shitload of electricity demand. That part is real. But “we’re turning energy into intelligence” is just dressing compute up like a new law of physics 😂 Data centers consume electricity to run computation. We can talk about the actual grid problem without turning it into mythology.

What utter drivel - just cringe

You’re in for quite a surprise.

The non biological intelligence needs to start approaching the energy efficiency of a biological intelligence machine that’s the human brain. The system is altogether too wasteful.

The original factory.

We are also turning a lot of energy into AI slop, further enshitification of the Internet, enrichment and consolidation of power into hands of narcissistic tech ceos and destroying the notion of IP.

Intelligence is a quality that hasn’t been consistently defined or measured for people (or living things). Extrapolating it risks bluster. Artificial intelligence. Machine intelligence. Non-biological intelligence. By the time a data center becomes a “factory that produces Intelligence”, the raw claim has been slipped into the noun. Rather this needs a measured debate about for whom and specifically what the centers provide. The end-users, end-losers, beneficiaries and costs.

I saw some movies about this once. Didn’t it end up producing power by hooking people up to a machine called the matrix? I’m not exactly sure, but I need to go back and watch those movies again.

Nuclear energy or suborbital solar panels could be the solution. Energy independence is key for countries today.

Very well summarized thank you

If they are so intelligent why can't they figure out how to run themselves with less power?

That's a deceptive twist that doesn't need to happen. To argue with the ignorant anti-data center people all you have to do is use the truth. They have none of that and cannot win an honest argument about it.

LLMs are not, and never have been, intelligence. They are narrative generators that are telling stories based on the prompts. There are scripts parsing the output to trigger on key words and do things, then telling the model the results so it can continue its narrative

This is the exact mechanism, maybe run once already. My theory: an earlier technological civilization hit this same wall — a planet that couldn't infinitely support them — and converted energy into non-biological intelligence to survive at all. This might be our test too. Are we "The Nth Civilization"?

I would push back on the first statement. Data centers do not produce intelligence. Running machine learning and using GPUs doesn’t guarantee intelligent outcomes.

‘Intelligence’ that can’t produce the same thing twice, doesn’t think, has no clue what I’m saying. A probability machine is not intelligence. It has its uses but let’s not overstate. There is no set and forget.

@NinaDSchick That’s fine. In other words, electricity is autonomous AI food. If AI needs more food, then it must earn its keep by facilitating more reliable food sources. Just like we do. Sounds like you are arguing to prioritize that. What are we waiting for?

"We got future energy demand so wrong because we did not foresee that non-biological Intelligence could be produced industrially". I mean outside of every SciFi novel ever? ;) There is even that whole Kardashev scale thing..e more correct to say ppl didn't take it seirously.

It takes half a power grid to recreate what biological intelligence does on 20 watts and a cup of coffee.

Nuclear energy. That is the answer.

AI is a civilization infrastructure

Did OpenRouter explain why agentic requests used 15x tokens? Is it that human requests lack adequate detail? Are agents overly verbose? Or is the human average drawn downwards with simple google-type requests, whereas agents are only doing detailed work?

to be fair, the machines are producing the power too...

Is this intelligence?

Americans seem to have difficulty with a huge "factory" that doesn't have an assembly line or produce a physical product. The product is intelligence, and the components are data.

AI is certainly NOT non-biological intelligence It records human data into weights, generalizes it through transformations, and repeats it at scale. They have now rebranded it as “machine intelligence” and sell it to corporations to replace humans. Cruel and deceptive trick.

The Amish have been warning us for years🤣🤣

We will very likely have a far more energy efficient intelligence soon.

Dyson swarm

It’s important that Mr. And Mrs. Joe Sixpack continue to fund the costs of this electricity in service to our overlords and the massive wealth they are obtaining.

Oh là oui ! On oublie trop l'énergie derrière l'IA. À Vivatech j'en parlais avec des amis. Vrai défi 😊

Did you intend for this to be posted on LinkedIn?

Keine Ahnung wer dieses Marketing-Sprech bezahlt... Das klingt mehr nach Lobby-Arbeit als nach fundanmentaler Wissenbasis...