One of the hottest debates in the energy sector over the past year has been exactly how much power artificial intelligence was going to soak up — and what the impact of this was going to be. On suppliers: good. On the green transition: mostly bad.
DeepSeek has turned such conversations on their head. Following the Chinese group’s release of a massively more efficient large language model, the question now is how much energy demand forecasts will need to be revised down — and where that leaves the utilities in this space.
It’s mainly a US issue. While the need for rapid answers means that data centres required to use AI products are best located close to their clients, those needed to train the models can be built where power is cheap. Europe, with its expensive electricity, was always going to be a bit player here — and has hence been relatively insulated both from the excitement that gripped US utilities and from this week’s ructions.