Vitality is the muse of each digital addition.
That’s what Antonio Coutinho, the CEO of EDP Innovation, mentioned in a presentation on the Internet Summit occasion in Lisbon, Portugal, on Tuesday, which was attended by Rigzone.
“The subsequent century shall be powered by volts, amps, and watts … AI’s future depends upon the electrons that we are able to generate and ship … power is the brand new bandwidth,” he added.
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Within the presentation, Coutinho identified that “we’re all the time speaking about AI” and mentioned “each firm needs to be an AI firm”. He went on to query, nonetheless, if we are able to “afford to have the power to help all this consumption”, including that “there’s a hidden value dependency that we often don’t discuss that a lot, which is about power”.
“Behind each immediate, each inference, each picture, there’s all the time a transformer, a copper line, and a technology asset – and no power, no intelligence,” Coutinho mentioned within the presentation.
“Behind each GPU cluster, there’s a transformer that makes this doable … power wants infrastructure and we’re beginning to see this pressure between power and digital,” he added.
Coutinho acknowledged in his presentation that, since 2014, AI compute has grown 350,000 instances. Technology belongings have grown just one.6 instances throughout the identical interval, he identified.
“So digital is scaling exponentially however the physics of the power simply go incrementally,” he mentioned.
“There’s the necessity of metal, copper, and other people and time to make this occur. You can’t copy paste a gigawatt … So the exponential is assembly the bodily bottlenecks and the bottlenecks are already seen across the power system,” he added.
In his presentation, Coutinho highlighted that “every hyperscale information heart wants round 300-500 megawatts of energy”.
“That is [a] medium sized energy plant. If you concentrate on cooling and redundancy, that is even double the quantity of demand,” he mentioned.
In response to his social media, Coutinho has been CEO of EDP Innovation since January 2021. Coutinho’s social media reveals that he additionally serves as President of Associação Portuguesa da Energia, which describes itself on social media because the Portuguese Member Committee of the World Vitality Council.
In a separate presentation on the Internet Summit, which was additionally attended by Rigzone, David Savage – Harvey Nash Group Tech Evangelist and host of the worldwide podcast Tech Talks – mentioned “AI is rightly the subject of so many various levels” on the 2025 Internet Summit and added that “it’s accelerating alternative quicker than ever”.
He warned, nonetheless, that “it’s colliding head on with a bodily pressure – energy”.
“Each immediate we kind, each token we generate, each mannequin we practice, it prices actual, finite energy,” he acknowledged.
Savage is described in a Internet Summit bio web page as “a prime tech influencer, speaker, [and] moderator”.
Internet Summit 2025 is happening from November 10-13. In response to the occasion’s web site, this yr’s Internet Summit is internet hosting 71,386 attendees from 157 international locations.
“2,725 startups, from 108 international locations, shall be exhibiting, with AI and machine studying rising as the highest trade,” the positioning states, including that “268 authorities delegations are becoming a member of from 82 international locations”.
EDP describes itself on its web site as a worldwide power chief with presence in Europe, North America, South America, and Asia Pacific.
“The corporate operates throughout 4 main platforms (Renewable Technology Property, Networks, Consumer Options and International Vitality Administration), relying on the expertise of almost 12,000 workers worldwide,” EDP’s web site notes.
“The group is without doubt one of the largest producers on the planet that includes a worldwide and distinctive portfolio of belongings in onshore and offshore wind and photo voltaic, in addition to hydro, with a complete put in capability of 32 gigawatts,” it provides.
“EDP is happy with being one of many greenest utilities on the planet, already producing round 90 % of its power from renewable sources,” it continues.
To contact the creator, e-mail andreas.exarheas@rigzone.com
