Silicon Valley’s tech bros are having a difficult few weeks. A growing number of investors worry that artificial intelligence (AI) will not deliver the vast profits they seek. Since peaking last month the share prices of Western firms driving the AI revolution have dropped by 15%. A growing number of observers now question the limitations … Read more
PWC, a professional-services firm, reckons that AI could add almost $16trn to global economic output by around 2030 (compared with 2017). McKinsey, a consulting firm, separately arrived at a similar figure, but now reckons this could rise by another 15-40% because of newer forms of AI such as large language models. Yet Africa, which has … Read more
The comparison with the famously capex-happy energy industry is apt not just because of the sums involved. AI needs vast amounts of processing power. And that processing power needs vast amounts of electricity. On May 2nd Bob Blue, chief executive of Dominion Energy, one of America’s biggest utilities, said that data-centre developers now regularly ask … Read more