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Sridhar Vembu
Entrepreneur Nick Huber (founder of a talent hiring firm, Somewhere) expressed frustration on X about his electricity bill in Athens, Georgia, rising 60% since 2023. He blamed it on the rapid expansion of AI data centers.
Nick Huber on X
“AI is going to go down as a disaster of colossal scale,” Nick Huber wrote, a blunt criticism of how the artificial intelligence boom is inflating real-world costs and straining energy infrastructure.
Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu responded to this post, contextualizing the issue from a global and particularly Indian standpoint.
He acknowledged Huber’s experience as a symptom of a deeper, structural problem in how today’s AI systems are built and deployed.
Sridhar’s response
Sridhar said on X: “One of the under-appreciated facts about the current state-of-the-art AI,” he wrote, “is how extraordinarily energy inefficient it is.”
Vembu argued that the current AI scenario, led by enormous GPU clusters driving large language models, is not feasible for nations such as India. Even assuming hardware access and capital are within reach, the energy expenditure would be astronomical.
Sridhar’s Rationale
“We cannot afford the electricity bill,” he warned, highlighting that expanding such infrastructure at scale would “hurt households and factories” by diverting limited energy
His post highlights an emerging conflict between AI innovation and ecological and economic realities. The hype surrounding artificial intelligence and its promise to disrupt industries, automate functions, and boost productivity often overshadows the unadvertised costs: substantial energy consumption, environmental pressure, and unequal access.
In calling for "radically more energy-efficient AI," Vembu was not brushing away the innovation but calling for a rethinking of computation itself, maybe towards neuromorphic chips, algorithmic efficiency, or alternative architectures inspired by biology to use power.
His viewpoint is part of a broader movement among technologists calling for "sustainable intelligence" technology that increases without disabling the planet or driving developing countries out of business.