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ben_wtoday at 8:42 AM0 repliesview on HN

A world, yes. Plausible, no.

The US is already seeing energy market distortions from the power use of AI; the UK has a much smaller total electricity supply, both from a lower population and the baseline per person being lower.

Total UK demand in 2023 was 316.8 TWh[0], or an average of about 36 GW. The US currently has 33 GW of data centres, and the AI boom plan, so far as discern actual plans from AI hallucinations in the modern web, is about ten times that.

From the scales people talk about, my expectation is that even the smaller additional supply needed for the constant churn of newly trained frontier models would probably exceed what London alone can manage.

[0] generation less than that, it has imports; chapter 5: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66a7e14da3c2a...

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=316.8+TWh+%2F+year