As the AI buildout continues and models improve from generation to generation, fears persist over how useful this technology will actually be in practice and whether AI will reach a ceiling before it makes a meaningful impact.
Although roles and responsibilities, and jobs, are being replaced in the name of AI, does that mean it’s changing things for the better?
“We as a global community have to get to a point where we’re using this to do something useful… Otherwise, I don’t think this makes much sense… In fact, I’ll say we’ll quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens.”
Energy scarcity
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2026 about the impact of AI on the global economy and the business world.
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In his remarks, Nadella acknowledged the tensions at the heart of the AI expansionism that has captured not only big tech but the vast majority of the corporate world.
For AI to continue growing at the pace it has been – not just in terms of the compute required to train the models but also for inference as usage grows – we’ll need plenty of data centers to churn through tokens. And for these tokens to be created, the AI pioneers will need plenty of energy.
Encountering bottlenecks
Burning as much electricity as AI companies plan on doing so for AI has caused alarm among the public – particularly as much of this has demanded infrastructure built close to populated areas in towns and cities.
Nadella acknowledged there has been a productivity gap between the hype around AI and the meaningful impact on people’s lives – warning that without something to point to, unrest will bubble up and boil over into something more obstructive.
As time passed, we’re seeing more tensions rise as people – and even legislators – object to new data center projects due to concerns over the impact on the energy grid, the environmental damage, and local communities.
