Are Massive Energy Consumption Forecasts for AI Data Center Operations Correct?

With the caveat that the following chart shows both data center energy consumption as well as cryptocurrency mining operations, manufacturing and electrification of fossil fuel operations, energy demand fueled in part by artificial intelligence is going to double consumption within six or seven years.

How that fits with pledges of net zero carbon dioxide footprints is unclear to some of us. 

source: Financial Times 

That noted, we cannot ever rule out human creativity and technology advances such as ways to dramatically lower energy consumption for AI-related operations, but some researchers suggest the demand for data center energy could grow much more than a doubling over the next six years. 

Study Title	Publisher	Year	Projected Growth
"Power Consumption of Large Scale Data Centers:"	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)	2019	Up to 10x growth by 2030
"The State of AI 2022	Stanford University	2022	Doubling of training compute every 3-4 months
"AI and the Environmental Footprint of Computing”	Cornell University	2020	Up to  1000x growth
"The AI Revolution's Power Squeeze"	Nature: https://www.nature.com/	2020	Up to 3x by 2025
"How AI is Changing the Data Center"	McKinsey & Company: https://www.mckinsey.com/	2022	2.5x to 4x by 2025
"The Implications of Deep Learning for Data Center Design"	Joule: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/joule	2019	Doubling within a few years

Most assumptions we make about future energy consumption are necessarily linear, and assume AI operations at data centers are not essentially examples of complicated ecosystems that are necessarily “chaotic” and subject to huge changes produced by small inputs that are part of our assumptions.