AI is driving up power demand, but how much and how fast remains under debate. Bulls warn we’ll need far more electric power than we’re poised to produce. Bears say utilities inflate the numbers and don’t account for the efficiencies technology tends to achieve over time.

The debate heightened recently when DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, announced that it had developed a more efficient AI large language model. This model purports to perform as well as US models but uses far less computing power and, therefore, less electricity.

This is a big deal because the power industry has been planning and investing based on the idea that AI will increase electric demand significantly.

So, exactly how much influence will DeepSeek have on electricity demand? In an interview with Energy Changemakers’ Elisa Wood, Rich Miller, former editor and founder of Data Center Knowledge and Data Center Frontier, explains why neither the bulls nor the bears are correct. 

Miller also describes the growing innovation of data centers, their increasingly important role in energy, and why they could transform the utility industry.

Stay until the end, when Miller unveils the surprising results of a poll he conducted with his data center industry followers. 

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Elisa Wood: “My world loves distributed energy, and I'm curious if you're seeing much of a push towards onsite energy for data centers?”

Rich Miller: “That is the million-dollar question. And in fact, that is the most important trend that I think we are seeing right now, largely because we have this sort of log jam where many data center operators want much more energy than they're going to be able to get from the utilities in the short term.”

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