By Brian Maher, The Daily Reckoning, 2024-06-20
This post AI's Biggest Challenge appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
Artificial Intelligence investors will soon dangle from the hooks of a fantastic dilemma.
Today we show you why.
Artificial intelligence has worked Wall Street into a state of high incandescence.
It represents the next “big thing.” And dizzied investors — fearful of “missing out” — are piling into it.
Consider for example NVDA — AI's primary wagon-puller.
The thing accounts for over one-third of 2024's stock market jumps.
What then is the fantastic dilemma to which we refer? It is this:
Artificial intelligence wars against the climate fanaticism presently amok in elite circles.
That is because artificial intelligence is a gluttonous devourer of energy.
It demands electrical power in quantities truly prodigious.
The movement of air — wind power — is inadequate to needs.
The harvesting of solar emissions is likewise inadequate to needs.
The wind does not always blow and the sun does not always glow.
They simply cannot satisfy artificial intelligence's extravagant appetites. Reports Digiday:
Over the last few months, it's been widely chronicled that generative AI already requires massive amounts of energy to run, leading the International Energy Agency to recently project that global data center electricity demand will more than double by 2026, including in the U.S.
Electrical demand will double and then some — within two years!
Whence will the electrical supply spring? Not from windmills. Not from rectangular receptacles and converters of solar radiation. More:
This realization directly counters the efforts media agencies have made in recent years to reduce carbon emissions for themselves, their clients and even the media companies whose ad time and space they buy.
How can they sink the irreconcilable differences? We do not believe they can.
You can expand the capacities of artificial intelligence. You can alternatively “go green.”
Yet you cannot do both. Not at once. Reports The Hill:
As of this writing, wind and solar account for only 14% of the total energy consumed in the U.S. In their present form, wind and solar simply cannot come close to providing enough energy to meet current energy demand, let alone the huge increase that is sure to come when AI data centers begin taking their toll on the nation's power grid.
Even BlackRock's Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink — himself a bugler for wind and solar energy — knows it:
These AI data centers are going to require more power than anything we could ever have imagined. We at the G7 do not have enough power.
The sole solution — which is not the solar solution — reduces to two energy givers.
The first is fossil fuels, so-called. If it is artificial intelligence you seek, it is fossil fuel expansion you must seek.
The second energy is nuclear energy. Yet nuclear energy is a hellish bugaboo to many environmental zealots.
And global governance is heavily against these energies. They are instead for wind and solar energies — the inadequate energies.
Once again, The Hill:
The largest obstacle to the rise of AI is the misguided energy policy that governments across the West have embarked upon in recent decades. The march toward net-zero carbon dioxide emissions and the insistence that we replace fossil fuel-based energy sources with so-called renewable energy sources like wind and solar poses the largest threat to an AI-based future.
In other words, the massive, ill-advised push by climate alarmists to transition almost overnight from reliable and affordable energy sources such as oil, natural gas and coal to not-ready-for-primetime green energy is incompatible with the huge amount of energy that AI will require in the decades to come…
What's more, wind and solar can provide energy only intermittently, meaning they can provide power only when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. AI data centers require a constant flow of energy. They cannot be shut down when it's cloudy or calm.
Returning to nuclear power:
We should reconsider nuclear power as a steady source of baseload energy. “Nuclear power is the most reliable energy source, and it's not even close,” the U.S. Department of Energy states.
Nuclear power is also far more environmentally friendly than wind or solar. “Wind farms require up to 360 times as much land area to produce the same amount of electricity as a nuclear energy facility… Solar photovoltaic facilities require up to 75 times the land area,” reports the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Who then is the authentic environmentalist? The wind and solar demoniac — or the atomic champion?
In our telling it is the atomic champion.
Thus the wind and solar demoniacs… including those on Wall Street… are squeezed within a pickle jar.
They must choose between artificial intelligence and their ideological fascinations — from which many profit.
Which will they select?
Below, income guru Zach Scheidt shows you the superior method of investing in artificial intelligence.
That is the safe, non-maniacal — yet lucrative — “pick and shovel” strategy.
The post AI's Biggest Challenge appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
