📢Microsoft and investing in AI!
US regulators are preparing an antitrust investigation into tech giants Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will focus onMicrosoft and OpenAI, while the Justice Department will probe Nvidia. The move comes at a time when theAI sector is rapidly developing and gaining prominence. It would be very unpleasant if there was any regulation that slowed down this development.
OpenAI, the maker of the popular ChatGPT, has partnered with Microsoft, which has invested around $13 billion in the company . Nvidia, the market leader inAI chips , has seen its share price rise by almost 150 % and its market capitalisation has surpassed $3 trillion for the first time .
Despite the investigation ,Microsoft $MSFTannounced a $3.2 billion investment in Swedish AI infrastructure over the next two years. This investment includes training for 250,000 Swedish citizens and boosting the capacity of data centres in Gavle, Sandviken and Staffanstorp. Microsoft will also provide more than20,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) for training AI models there .
According to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), data centres could consume up to 9 % of all electricity in the US by 2030. The annual growth rate of electricity consumption for AI is between 3,7 % a 15 %. This too may be a reason for regulation!
Microsoft has announced similar investments in other countries such as France (€4 billion) a Japan (2.9 billion dollars). According to the president Microsoft's president, Brad Smith, the Swedish investment will enable the country to build a world-class AI infrastructure that will be neutral thanks to their progressive energy policy and approach to green energy.
This huge investment in AI have the potential to accelerate development and pave the way for further investment opportunities. Not only Microsoft investing in AI infrastructure in Europe, but also Amazon or Google have announced multi-billion dollar investments.
What do you think about the future of AI, will we see some stricter bans or restrictions?
It's hard to say, there will probably be some limitations over time and it depends on how AI is used and it's possible that in the future people will abuse it and will use AI to search and do things they shouldn't, but they should ban and limit those platforms right away. I mean, currently I'm not worried about any restrictions.
I don't think the limitations will be much around AI yet. Everybody wants to get a hold of it and they want it. It's only when one company gets too powerful and it starts to bother maybe some governments and they start to worry. But the energy consumption you mention is interesting to think about ...