A Cumbrian tech company is harnessing renewable power to feed the ever-increasing energy demands of artificial intelligence.
SMS Speedway, at Roweltown near Carlisle, develops AI-based applications for the financial, property and e-commerce sectors.
It has installed two 15-kilowatt wind turbines to generate electricity and is beefing up solar capacity and battery storage to enable it to supply up to 90 per cent of its energy needs from renewables.
Chief executive Bradley Kieser said: “We are using the natural resources of Cumbria – wind and solar – to generate the electricity for our servers.
“As AI becomes ever more capable of tackling increasingly complex tasks, the energy requirements increase exponentially.
“New technologies such as Mamba come along that should flatten the consumption curve but the carbon footprint is already very big.
“We strive to be a green business so this is our way of ensuring that we’re not contributing to global warming through our activities.”
Bradley, who founded SMS Speedway as a communications company in the 1990s, points out that there are areas where AI can reduce energy use, for example by finding efficiencies in transport logistics that reduce the distance travelled by lorries, shipping and airfreight.
But overall, AI is expected to add substantially to energy consumption.
A recent study by Alex De Vries, of the VU Amsterdam School of Business and Economics, found that the global energy consumption of AI is set to reach 85-134 terawatt hours of electricity by 2027, equivalent at the upper end to the total annual power consumption of a country the size of the Netherlands.
When SMS Speedway needs to buy-in power, it sources electricity from the renewables specialist Octopus Energy. However, its investment in battery storage should reduce the need for this, enabling it to store its own electricity to provide continuity of supply when there is no wind or sunshine.
The company even uses AI to optimise efficiency. The AI checks weather forecasts to ensure that energy-hungry AI jobs, that are not time-critical, are carried out when renewable power is plentiful.
All this should give comfort to corporate customers looking to burnish their ESG – environmental, social and governance – credentials by insisting that suppliers follow best practice on CO2 emissions.
Bradley also points out that, by having on-site servers, SMS Speedway is able to hold clients’ data securely – another key consideration.
He said: “Our AI systems are not connected to the internet so there is no data leakage.
“We base our AI solutions on open-source AI, which ensures they are private, secure and GDPR compliant. If you use non open-source commercial AI suppliers, they use your data and usage to help them develop their services. So using them you’re not strictly GDPR compliant.”
