Why Mike Cannon-Brookes isn't worried about power-hungry AI's climate impact
He's bet billions on AI via Atlassian but is also a known climate activist. And he says artificial intelligence will act as a growth engine for renewables.
Many environmentalists are concerned that energy-guzzling artificial intelligence will harm the planet. Mike Cannon-Brookes isn’t one of them.
The Atlassian co-founder and CEO, famous for being both a leading technologist and climate activist, said at Tuesday’s National Tech Summit in Melbourne that AI will actually be a boon for green energy — and those who are worried are simply misunderstanding artificial intelligence.
“What people are concerned about here is, AI uses a lot of computing power, therefore it will somehow make the climate problem worse,” Cannon-Brookes said, calling into the conference via Zoom. “There’s a set of leaps in there.”
Cutting-edge artificial intelligence models are trained in data centres by tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year said electricity is the biggest hurdle to AI development and that the industry will most certainly never have enough.
