The availability and cost of energy is becoming a constraint on technology use — one IT managers must plan to address as enterprise AI applications increase computing needs in organizations. The electricity required to power expanding IT workloads, especially considering rising AI energy use, was an undercurrent at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2024, which ends today. The annual event also featured discussions of emerging technologies, such as agentic AI, and an IT future that could see multiple developments, such as quantum computing and neuromorphic computing, arrive in the same time span — developments that are expected to drive the need to orchestrate deeper layers of technology resources. But conference speakers pointed to energy consumption as a here-and-now issue that’s unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. Jensen Huang, president and CEO at Nvidia, said progress against Moore’s law — which holds that CPU performance effectively doubles every two years with minimal added cost — distantly lags the amount of data organizations process these days. The slowing rate of performance increases began a decade ago and is now “to the point where it is non-existent,” Huang said during his keynote session. The result is spiraling compute costs and energy use. “If your compute demand continues to grow exponentially, but general-purpose computing performance does not, then you should be experiencing computing cost inflation and, very importantly, computing energy inflation,” Huang said. “In fact, energy consumption is going up exponentially.” Huang, whose company is a leading supplier of GPUs, said accelerated computing addresses energy efficiency. “You have to use acceleration wherever you can,” he said.

Experts opinion : Exploding artificial intelligence use must have alternate energy tech solutions including acceleration; microgrids; and, eventually, emerging technologies.