This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

Most of us know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is using a hell of a lot of energy. It takes an enormous amount of electricity to keep our Google Maps going, or to generate glam videos of ourselves with immaculate hair, operate our AI toothbrush, or run our flirtbot (if that's where you're at).

Around seven watt-hours of electricity, in fact, are needed to create one image using the OpenAI image generator, and, according to Time Magazine, the first week after the tool was released, users created 700 million, consuming 5GWh.

Meanwhile, energy consumption to train GPT-4 last year was over 50GWh. That's the electricity consumption of more than five Edinburghs.

But generally we don’t think about it much as we merrily swipe and tap away. Nor do we think about the massive roll out of data centres required to keep our data and AI dependency growing.

Although, I did find myself thinking about exactly that as I squandered a few moments and a few watts generating images of my cat, Pearl, flying with resplendent wings. I made four of them - which, I guess, would amount to 28 watt-hours.

In total, across Scotland, according to the tech justice non-profit Foxglove, energy-hungry data centres........

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