微軟執行長納德拉：AI消耗大量能源需獲「社會許可」

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Microsoft’s Nadella: AI needs ‘social permission’ to consume so much energy

The tech CEO said companies still need to prove that AI will spark widespread economic growth.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during the OpenAI DevDay event on Nov. 06, 2023, in San Francisco. (Photo by Justin Sullivan) | Getty Images

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned this weekend that the vast amount of energy consumed by artificial intelligence could turn people against the industry — and that AI and tech companies need to earn public trust to turn things around.

“At the end of the day, I think that this industry — to which I belong — needs to earn the social permission to consume energy, because we’re doing good in the world,” Nadella told Mathias Döpfner in an hourlong interview. Döpfner is chair and CEO of Axel Springer, the German media group that owns POLITICO.

While downplaying the immediate impact of AI on power consumption, Nadella admitted that the rapid growth of data centers is “putting a lot of pressure” on the electric grid — and that the public will accept that pressure only if it “results in economic growth that is broad-spread in the economy.”

Nadella’s remarks add to a growing chorus of industry voices warning that the sector’s ravenous appetite for electricity could spark a public backlash.

Several successful candidates in November’s elections campaigned against the vast energy consumed by data centers, creating a new political liability for the industry and threatening a new, populist-tinged complication for President Donald Trump’s push for a rapid expansion of AI.

To head off future political friction, Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC with a more than $100 million war chest, recently launched a new project to convince the public that AI will boost economic growth and wellbeing. Nathan Leamer, the director of Build American AI, told POLITICO that the project aims to “tell a positive story about how this AI can be leveraged for good.”

Nadella was less skeptical in the interview when asked about another public concern about the AI industry: whether it might be leading to an AI investment bubble.

Nadella largely dismissed the critique, arguing that AI won’t create an investment bubble as long as it delivers broad productivity gains that translate into an expanded economy. He warned that nothing — not even a runaway hype machine like AI — can outrun economic fundamentals.

“It can’t be a few companies in one sector, in one continent having all the returns, it has to be a much broader phenomenon,” said Nadella. “Otherwise it’ll be a ‘road to nowhere.’ But I feel pretty confident that we are on a path to this. But at the same time, it won’t be linear — nothing is.”

Nadella cited Microsoft’s Azure, the company’s cloud platform, seeing revenue jump 40 percent in its first quarter report as evidence that AI is generating real revenue at scale.

Nadella said Microsoft is taking a disciplined approach to capital spending and building globally distributed AI infrastructure with sovereignty controls.

Analysts have noted the macro effects of the AI buildout: In a recent report, J.P Morgan Asset Management strategist Stephanie Aliaga said that AI-related capital expenditures were now a significant chunk of overall GDP growth, “outpacing the U.S. consumer as an engine of expansion.”

Watch: The Conversation

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