NEWS FROM THE FUTURE | Power struggle: crypto vs chatbots

Dateline: April 24 2027

During the energy crisis of 2022 analysts were quick to point out that crypto mining, especially bitcoin, consumes as much electricity globally as a small country. Before this it was all about profit, with crypto megaminers relocating to the places with the cheapest electricity to feed their power-hungry rigs. But after the Nord Stream pipeline was cut and Germany turned to coal to keep the lights on, the debate shifted to climate change and basic security of energy to bolster the economy. Bitcoin was the bad guy.

And then came ChatGPT and all the other large language models capable of generating text, images and video from natural language prompts. AI was the new flavour of the month, and chipmakers such as Nvidia saw their stock skyrocket. Pretrained transformers could write whole books and make short movies, almost like people. But training requires enormous amounts of data crunching and generating anything more than a paragraph of text burns mega megawatts. Soon, data centres optimised for AI with their huge neural networks began to be measured in megawatts rather than compute power.

As all the tech giants from Microsoft to Adobe piled into generative AI to enhance their products, bottlenecks appeared, first with chips then with raw power. Bitcoin shot up, making mining on faster, more powerful and more costly systems more profitable, pushing electricity demand higher still. Now it wasn’t price that mattered, just availability. Tech giants began eyeing small nuclear reactors to meet their energy needs.