Elon Musk: AI will run out of electricity and transformers in 2025
Elon Musk gave a closing Q&A (albeit a remote one) at the Bosch Connected World conferenceBosch Connected World conference
"I've never seen any technology advance faster than this." The chip shortage may be behind us, but AI and EVs are expanding at such a rapacious rate that the world will face supply crunches in electricity and transformers next year, says Elon Musk.
In a dial-in Q&A to close the Bosch Connected World conference, the recent Nobel Peace Prize nominee spoke about self-driving cars and humanoid robots, and hinted at what's coming next from Tesla in electric vehicles – but he clearly wanted to send the clearest possible signal to industry as well: Get going on clean energy generation, and make as many electrical transformers as you can.
MORE STORIES
The Lenovo ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop Concept was presented at MWC 2024 in Barcelona this week
LAPTOPS
First transparent laptop shows Lenovo's clear vision for future working
Interesting foot placement there! The H1 is showing some remarkable speed and agility
ROBOTICS
Video: Unitree H1 humanoid breaks world speed record and tackles stairs
We'll let Musk take it from here in his own words, lightly edited:
"The artificial intelligence compute coming online appears to be increasing by a factor of 10 every six months. Like, obviously that cannot continue at such a high rate forever, or it'll exceed the mass of the universe, but I've never seen anything like it. The chip rush is bigger than any gold rush that's ever existed.
I think we really are on the edge of probably the biggest technology revolution that has ever existed.
Elon Musk
"I think we really are on the edge of probably the biggest technology revolution that has ever existed. You know, there's supposedly a Chinese curse: 'May you live in interesting times.' Well, we live in the most interesting of times. For a while, it was making me a bit depressed, frankly. I was like, 'Well, will they take over? Will we be useless?' But the way I reconciled myself to this question was: Would I rather be alive to see the AI apocalypse or not? I'm like, I guess I'd like to see this. It's not gonna be boring.
"The constraints on AI compute are very predictable... A year ago, the shortage was chips; neural net chips. Then, it was very easy to predict that the next shortage will be voltage step-down transformers. You've got to feed the power to these things. If you've got 100-300 kilovolts coming out of a utility and it's got to step down all the way to six volts, that's a lot of stepping down.
