- AI is all the rage right now, but the next major step for artificial intelligence is superintelligence. That’s what some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley are pouring billions of dollars into. And Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive from 2001 to 2011, said the biggest challenge in achieving and utilizing superintelligence will be having enough electricity to power it all.
It seems every company under the sun these days is leveraging, investing in, or using AI in some way or another. The value of artificial intelligence—automating repetitive tasks, boosting efficiency, and solving extremely complex problems—has Wall Street salivating.
But it’s superintelligence, not just AI, that has Silicon Valley atwitter—and it’s why some of the biggest companies, including Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Sam Altman’s OpenAI, are warring over AI talent. All the dominant tech players want to be the first to build intelligence that “greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest,” according to University of Oxford researcher Nick Bostrom’s book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
“Superintelligence is intelligence beyond the sum of all humans,” Eric Schmidt, former CEO and chairman of Google, wrote in a LinkedIn post Thursday. “It is reasonable to predict that we are going to have specialized AI savants in every field within five years. Now imagine their capabilities and how they will change society and our day-to-day lives.”
Schmidt, who spoke with Peter Diamandis and Dave Blundin in a new episode of their Moonshots podcast published Thursday, spoke about the most complex limiting factor. Hint: It’s not money—and it’s not semiconductors, either.
“AI’s natural limit is electricity, not chips,” Schmidt said.
“The U.S. is currently expected to need another 92 gigawatts of power to support the AI revolution. For reference, one gigawatt is roughly the equivalent of one nuclear power station. Right now, there are essentially none of these facilities being built, and in the last 30 years, only two have been constructed,” he added.
Silicon Valley giants are working to resurrect and retrofit old power plants to help power their AI needs. Microsoft, for one, struck a 20-year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy to restart Three Mile Island, which closed in 2019, targeting a relaunch in 2028.
But even now, Microsoft is using a ton of resources for AI: In its latest environmental report, the Windows maker said it increased its water use between 2021 and 2022 by 34%, to around 1.7 billion gallons, which outside experts largely tied to AI. And researchers believe global AI workloads may use 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic meters of water by 2027—enough to fill anywhere from 1.7 to 2.6 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Put another way, that’s enough water to supply the entire population of Canada for more than a year.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last year an energy breakthrough “is essential for AI’s future.” (Altman, for what it’s worth, has personally invested in Helion, a startup working on nuclear fusion, and backed its 2028 pilot plant.) In May, companies like Microsoft and AMD urged U.S. senators to fast-track permits to avoid wearing down the grid due to AI’s high-energy demands. Critics like Greenpeace say at the current rate, AI usage risks derailing national and global climate goals.
“We don’t know what AI will deliver, and we certainly don’t know what superintelligence will bring, but we know that it is coming fast,” Schmidt said. “We need to plan ahead to ensure we have the energy needed to meet the many opportunities and challenges that AI puts before us.”
You can watch Schmidt’s full conversation with Diamandis and Blundin about what artificial superintelligence might actually look like here.
