Power is knowledge: How AI is changing the energy picture - As-salamu alaykum
As-salamu alaykum. During his opening remarks at Adipec 2025, Dr Sultan Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and ADNOC’s managing director and group CEO, summed up a new reality for the global energy system: “The true cost of AI is not just in code, it’s in kilowatts.”
A big part of his talk was about growth. He told attendees that long-term demand is rising for every kind of energy in every market, and that our response should be guided by data rather than drama.
Dr Al Jaber warned that many of the world’s old grids and transmission systems aren’t fit for what’s coming. AI workloads are putting pressure not just on chips and servers but across the whole energy chain - generation, transmission, cooling and computation.
That change is shifting how we think about both energy and access to knowledge. The old saying “knowledge is power” feels reversed now: in the age of AI, power is knowledge. Without reliable electricity to run high-performance computing, you don’t get machine learning, automation or the kinds of digital advances we expect.
Moore’s Law - the idea from 1965 that transistor counts would double roughly every two years - shaped computing for decades. But as Dr Al Jaber pointed out, that era is changing. Progress is less about packing more transistors on a chip and more about how much energy we can produce to run ever-larger AI models. Power, rather than transistor density, is becoming the benchmark.
Data centres already use as much power as some countries. Much of that energy goes to running and cooling servers so they don’t overheat. The International Energy Agency estimates global data centre electricity use could reach about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030 - roughly Japan’s annual consumption.
The demand curve is steepening: compute used to train AI systems has nearly doubled every six months since 2010, far faster than Moore’s two-year cadence. Each big advance in AI needs a big increase in electricity.
As AI becomes central to health care, logistics, manufacturing and media, the UAE’s energy strategy is shifting from just balancing supply and demand to enabling data-driven growth. Providing the power that runs intelligence is now part of the national mission.
At Adipec 2025, Dr Al Jaber’s remarks captured that moment of change: the next wave of technological progress will rely not only on code and connectivity but on the energy that makes intelligence possible.
P.S. A few unrelated news snippets and specs were included in the original post; if you want those rewritten into a Muslim-friendly local context (car details, startup info, or regional updates), let me know and I can adapt them with appropriate phrasing.
https://www.thenationalnews.co