Opinion
Koomey: Anyone forecasting 2035 data center power demand is making it up
“So I think anyone who claims to know what's going to happen in twenty-thirty-five, the data center of electricity use, I think is just making it up.”
Insight
Koomey: Rebound effects from efficiency gains are typically only 10 to 20%
“Yes, the car's a little bit cheaper, and yes, people drive a little bit more, but generally, these effects tend to be kind of small. They tend to be kind of 10 to 20%.”
Opinion
Koomey: OpenAI lacks an obvious path to profitability without massive growth
“Open AI right now is just a major, it's hemorrhaging cash like you can't believe, right? There's no obvious way that they become profitable without a massive increase in the demand for their services and the ability to raise the cost, and that is really unclea…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Koomey: AI industry will pivot to massive efficiency gains under infrastructure constraints
“Between those various, ah, improvements that you can get beyond just shrinking transistors and making things closer together, there's orders of magnitude possibility for improving efficiency, and so my sense is that the, you know, the focus has been basically …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Koomey: US data center load will double once more then level out
“It would not surprise me if You know, we saw another doubling, but I would say, you know, probably that's about it. I think that's going to level out, and then people are going to be more efficient at what they're doing based on the history”
Assertion Supported
Koomey: Data center compute grew 6x while power rose only 6% (2010-2018)
“We had about a six-fold increase in the compute output for data centers from 20 10 to 20 18, but electricity use went up a grand total of six percent over that period.”
Assertion Supported
Koomey: IEA hides data and calculations for its power forecasts
“Whereas some of the other projections, even From pretty credible organizations like the International Energy Agency, you can't actually figure out what they did. They don't release the data. They don't release the calculations in any explicit way.”
Opinion
Koomey: Analysts wrongly use Nvidia sales projections to forecast electricity growth
“And usually what they're assuming is NVIDIA's business plan is our growth forecast. Right? They're just saying, because for AI, they're just saying, well, NVIDIA has this projection for the next few years of how many AI nodes they're gonna sell, and they just …”
Insight
Koomey: Software moves on one-year cycles while physical infrastructure takes decades
“The world of
Bits moves really fast. They have all the money in the world. The world of atoms is slower. So it's like a year for the world of bits, 10 years or 20 years for the world of atoms, and so it's like a mismatch.”
Assertion Supported
Koomey: US data center power share rose to 4.4% in 2023
“The U the U S number from the report to Congress that just came out from LBL was something like on the order of two percent of the electricity in 20, 20, 20, 21 was data centers. And now in 20, 23, now, 2023, which is the last historical year we have, it's 4.4…”
Assertion Supported
Koomey: IEA data center electricity estimates varied by 50% in 2024
“So for the year, 20, 22, the International Energy Agency did these projections. They did two of them in, in, in, 20, 24, and they started by trying to do history, and they looked at twenty-twenty-two, and the first study they released in January had a number t…”
Assertion Supported
Koomey: Total US electricity generation in 2023 merely matched 2018 levels
“Twenty-twenty-three was about the same amount of generation as twenty-eighteen.”
