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Power

2025

Source: TW

“Electricity bill .. up 60% since 2023” in Athens, Georgia (US) due to new AI data center demand for electricity.

One of the under-appreciated facts about the current state-of-the art AI is how extraordinarily energy inefficient it is.

This is a huge issue for India. Even if we could afford all the GPUs (not!), we cannot afford the electricity bill. We cannot afford to hurt households and factories.

Sort of apropos the last RT from Sridhar Vembu: I learnt some interesting factoids from an engineer:

Power generation

The Chinese have vastly superior power generation to other nations.

China: 10073 Terawatt-hours (TWh; tera=10^12)
USA: 4387 TWh
India: 1824 TWh

So while India produces a lot, it is nowhere in the league of the two above it. So indeed, power will be a major shortcoming to field AIs at home.

Efficiency

American AI chips/GPUs are, on average, calculated as yielding about 58% more tokens per joule. So they are clearly more energy efficient than anything the Chinese have been able to field (despite their grandiose claims of superefficient photonic chips: no one has seen them really deploy anything like that).

India outlook

However, this gets balanced out by the fact that they produce vastly more power and most of that goes for industry rather than residential consumption.

India will, at best, get second-rate chips/gpus from the Occident. Hence, it will be hit with a double whammy of lower power production and inefficient chips.

So far only the Dutch can produce the deep-UV lithography machines needed to make the highest end chips. Their export by the Dutch is tightly controlled by their rotten soybean overlord, the mahAmlechCha. Hence, neither chIna-s nor India is going to be able receive any such tech for their endogenous fabrication.

Hence, the frontier of AI remains inaccessible for India as things stand. The power factor remains a barrier even for nations with cutting edge tech capabilities like Germany, which has the capacity to achieve the Dutch UV-lithography.