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OpenAI CEO Backs Green Energy Solutions for AI

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green energy solutions, green energy, energy solutions, openai, sam altman, exowatt

With the support of prominent investors, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is investing in Exowatt, which promises green energy solutions for the AI sector.

  • AI models heavily rely on data centers, leading to significant resource consumption.
  • Altman acknowledges the potential strain on conventional power grids and advocates for breakthroughs in energy technology.

OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, is backing up green energy solutions to meet the future demand of the AI sector.

Any AI model heavily relies on massive data centers to function properly. However, the main problem with these centers is that they consume natural resources at an astonishing rate. OpenAI’s ChatGPT “drinks” a small bottle of FRESH water for every 20 or so questions you ask it, but that’s not the only resource that AI systems consume in humans consume air. In fact, a report from Nature suggests that ChatGPT is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes.

These numbers will keep rising as we move forward into an AI-driven, or rather AI-reliant future. There may come a time when conventional power grids buckle under the stress of AI systems, particularly data-intensive applications like large language models (LLMs).

Even OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, recently admitted at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting in Davos that there’s no way to move forward “without a breakthrough,” with the hopes that this breakthrough comes as nuclear fusion. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t open to exploring other green energy solutions in the meantime.

As a result, with the support of other investors, like venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Altman has committed approximately $20 million to Exowatt – a Miami-based startup focused on making AI data centers greener.

Exowatt is especially interested in providing modular solar systems capable of supplying nearly free energy to AI companies, built from independent, interchangeable units that can be easily added or removed to meet the changing energy needs of the data center. Their target cost is one cent per kilowatt-hour.

For reference, the average retail price for electricity in the U.S. was around 12.72 U.S. dollar cents per kilowatt-hour in 2023. To achieve this ambitious goal, the company is combining modular solar platforms with thermal energy storage (TES). Their plan seems to offer a scalable and sustainable green energy solution tailored for data centers.

TES includes heating or cooling a material to a certain temperature and then storing said material in a well-insulated container. Science has been around for a while now, but its widespread adoption has been lagging. That is mainly due to the cost and the complexity of the system, making it undesirable for residential applications.

Despite all this, Exowatt CEO Hannan Parvizian remains optimistic, saying to Fortune that Exowatt expects to have the technology online this year.

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