Who Will Power the 21st Century? — with Hannah Ritchie

**Scott Galloway** (0:01)
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**Scott Galloway** (1:24)
Episode 410 410 is the area code serving Eastern Maryland. In 2010, Instagram launched. True story, I've become the CMO for Meta, I've come up with a bunch of new ads. Meta. Ignore the smell coming from the basement. Facebook. Elevating your aunt's conspiracy theories.
Meta. Fucking elections since 2006
And finally, my new tagline, Meta. We're hurting children.

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**Scott Galloway** (2:05)
Welcome to the 410th episode of The Prof G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and writer working at the intersection of environmental change, technology, and global development. With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Hannah Ritchie.
Hannah, where does this podcast find you?

**Hannah Ritchie** (2:30)
Edinburgh in Scotland.

**Scott Galloway** (2:32)
Oh my gosh. I knew I liked you.

**Hannah Ritchie** (2:36)
You couldn't tell by the accent?

**Scott Galloway** (2:38)
Yeah, it's a wee bit of a tell. Born and raised in Edinburgh?

**Hannah Ritchie** (2:43)
In Falkirk, so pretty close by. It's kind of in the middle of Scotland.

**Scott Galloway** (2:47)
Wow. And have you lived there your entire life, or any ventures overseas?

**Hannah Ritchie** (2:52)
No, I moved down south, so I was in London for a while, I was in Oxford for a while. So I always say this is my posh accent, this is my podcast accent that I picked up from England.

**Scott Galloway** (3:03)
My father in America got away with so much professionally and personally because of his Scottish accent.
Anyways, I think you're blessed with something that's not your fault. Anyway, neither here nor there, let's bust right into it. The biggest stories this year, Iran, AI, have largely been energy stories.
So let's start with AI because most of that conversation is about models and jobs and valuations. But it's also a story about power, literally. You've done the actual accounting here. Your piece last month at Our World in Data puts data centers as a whole at roughly one and a half percent of global electricity with AI-specific facilities at about half a percent. Walk us through the energy picture here. What you read on the data center outrage.

**Hannah Ritchie** (3:51)
Yeah. So these estimates come from the International Energy Agency. And as you see, they put data center electricity consumption around one and a half percent of the world's electricity. And I think that's not just AI, that's everything we use that's digital. So us recording this podcast, people listening to it, most of our daily lives are consumed by data center usage. And AI is a component of that. So AI is roughly around half a percent of the world's electricity. And I think people are always very surprised because that probably seems quite small to people. I think there are two things going on there. One is that those are current estimates, right? We don't know how that trajectory is going to change in the future.
There is this kind of explosion of investment in AI and data center. That could change quite rapidly. But I think the second thing that I think people wonder, appreciate is the challenge with energy demand for AI is really a geographical and localized problem.