AI: the joke that keeps on entertaining

Artificial intelligence is not funny. It is extremely serious, potentially dangerous, and also potentially extremely lucrative. Yet you will have to excuse me but AI is absolutely hilarious when it comes to things such as energy demand… and copper demand. AI looks set to shake the resource industries in a way they haven’t been shaken before.

We’ve talked about AI’s energy consumption and what it’s going to do to overall energy demand. A lot of people have talked about what it’s going to do to natural gas demand, too, and they’re still talking, with Bloomberg this week reporting that demand for electricity from AI data centres is going to increase ten times between now and 2030, noting that “Climate advocates are understandably dismayed.”

It seems, however, that what AI is about to do to energy demand is the same thing it is about to do to copper demand. At least according to BHP. “Today, data centres are less than 1 per cent of copper demand, but that is expected to be 6 to 7 per cent by 2050,” the miner’s CFO, Vandita Pant, told the FT, following with the observation that “There is a lot of copper in data centres.” It’s the joke that keeps on giving.