American business tycoon Elon Musk is worried about the looming shortage of electricity and transformers as early as next year due to the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and electric vehicles, New Atlas reported in early March.
Musk’s concerns about looming energy shortages
Elon Musk voiced out his concerns about the potential impact of AI and battery-powered cars on electricity and transformer supplies during a Q&A portion to conclude the Bosch Connected World conference last month.
He cited the neural net chips shortage the industry faced in 2023 and projected that the next issue would be voltage step-down transformers, which are key components for AI systems.
“My not-that-funny joke is that you need transformers to run transformers. You know, the AI is like… There’s this thing called a transformer in AI… I don’t know, it’s a combination of sort of neural nets… Anyway, they’re running out of transformers to run transformers.”
Elon Musk
The Tesla boss further warned that the next shortage will be electricity.
“They won’t be able to find enough electricity to run all the chips. I think next year, you’ll see they just can’t find enough electricity to run all the chips.”
Elon Musk
Elon Musk explained the AI tech and electric vehicles’ interconnectedness, noting that both heavily depend on electricity and voltage transformers. He forecasts that the electricity supply may become scarce to support the growing number of AI chips and EVs by 2025.
“The simultaneous growth of electric cars and AI, both of which need electricity, both of which need voltage transformers – I think, is creating a tremendous demand for electrical equipment and electrical power generation.”
Elon Musk
Call for clean energy development and transformers production
The American billionaire took the opportunity to call for the industry to immediately focus on improving clean energy generation and bolstering electric transformers production to subdue the looming supply shortage.
Elon Musk claimed that AI technology and electric vehicles are growing at an “unprecedented rate,” even analogizing the technological advancement rate to historic gold rushes.
“The artificial intelligence compute coming online appears to be increasing by a factor of 10 every six months. Like, 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.”
Elon Musk
Tesla Chief further asserted his perception that the world is already “on the edge of probably the biggest technology revolution that has ever existed.”
“A Chinese curse”
Despite the potential electricity and transformer shortage, among other risks, Elon Musk still supports the advancement of AI tech rather than not.
“You know, there’s supposedly a Chinese curse: ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Well, we live in the most interesting of times.”
Elon Musk
The Tesla boss admitted that he was a “bit depressed” for a while with the recent developments. However, his love for innovation continues to overcome such negativities.
“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.”
Elon Musk
All that said, the industry must start to launch significant measures to suppress the looming electricity and transformer shortage by increasing renewable energy adoption and transformer production to ensure continuous technological innovations that can significantly benefit the world and the humans living in it.
