AI technology seems to be a hot topic in every industry, and broadband is no exception. It seems inevitable that AI will be used to help monitor and control complex broadband networks. It looks like the biggest ISPs are already phasing AI into the customer service process.

Nobody seems to be able to answer the big question of whether AI will change the amount of broadband the average household uses. It’s not an easy question to answer, but it’s a reasonable question to ask because I read weekly about how AI is going to affect the way we communicate, and that seems likely to involve broadband.

AI’s Impact

An easier question to answer is AI’s impact on U.S. power consumption. It’s clear, at least for now, that AI and cryptocurrencies are fueling the construction of a lot of new data centers. The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) report for 2024 predicts a big uptick in worldwide power demand coming from data centers. IEA estimates that worldwide data centers in 2022 used about 460 Terawatt Hours (TWh) of power and predicts that by 2026, demand from data centers will grow to between 620 and 1,050 TWh. That would be the equivalent of adding as much energy used annually by Sweden at the low end of the estimate or Germany at the top end. IEA says that data centers in the U.S. will grow from using 4% of generated power in 2022 to 6% in 2026.

The impact on broadband usage is harder to pin down. AI will impact broadband usage is several ways. There is the middle-mile impact of supporting the many new AI data centers. There are two types of data going to and from data centers. There is traffic sent to and from users asking AI to respond to queries. That means a public-facing AI data center should be equally as busy as a data center that responds to Google searches today. The second big use of broadband comes from feeding the public-facing data centers with the massive amount of data needed to ‘train’ the AI. A public AI data center imports piles of data scraped from websites and other sources. An AI data center will create a busy node on the Internet that will draw a lot of traffic.

The Future

The biggest uses of future AI will probably not be in the big public AI data centers, but from data centers dedicated to big corporate users. Big corporations like Bank of America are not going to use the big public AI data centers, but will create their own AI data center to crunch their own data. One can picture a large new stream of Internet traffic coming from the many branches of Bank of America to feed the company’s own AI data center.

Both kinds of data centers will create new demand for long-haul and middle-mile fiber networks. Companies are likely to place AI data centers close to the existing long-haul networks that carry traffic from city to city. Companies that operate fiber transport networks are expecting a lot of AI-related traffic. I remember seeing that one of the justifications for the recent upgrade in Zayo long-haul networks was to prepare for AI.

The impact on home broadband is harder to predict. It’s possible that AI will decrease the amount of bandwidth used at home. If I research a topic today to write a blog, I do a Google search and perhaps visit a half dozen websites looking for background information. If I instead ask an AI search engine to find what I need, I’m going to look at fewer web sites if I’m satisfied with the AI answer to my questions. A recent article in Scientific American suggests that Google might use 30 times more energy to answer my question using AI instead of its traditional search engine. But at my home computer, I will likely use less bandwidth to get the condensed response from Google AI. Most of my interfaces with AI involve transmitting short questions to the AI cloud and receiving relatively short responses.

This doesn’t mean there won’t eventually be more data-intensive uses for AI in the home. It may be possible to use AI to create a truly smart home that takes care of our needs automatically. I’m still waiting for the big virtual input screen that floats in the air in front of me like I’ve been seeing in futuristic movies. But for now, for most users, it’s hard to think that AI will increase bandwidth usage at home.