Ai Energy Forecasting | AI Final Year Project Report

Complete Technical Paper Content — Ai Energy Forecasting

1. Executive Abstract, Problem Formulation & Background

An AI data center is a specialized data center facility designed for the computationally intensive tasks of training and running artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning models. Unlike general-purpose data centers, they are often optimized for the parallel processing demands of AI workloads, typically using hardware such as AI accelerators (GPUs, TPUs) and high-speed interconnects. The global push to construct these specialized facilities accelerated dramatically during the AI boom of the 2020s. In 2026, major tech companies were estimated to spend $650 billion on AI data centers. Their purchases of memory chips, particularly High Bandwidth Memory, led to a global memory supply shortage amid a broader competition for semiconductors, power, and infrastructure. About 70% of global computer memory production in the 2026 fiscal year has been purchased for AI data centers. AI-focused data centers use around 60 kilowatts of electricity per server rack, while general-purpose data centers typically use around 10 kilowatts of electricity per rack. By 2026, many U.S. communities had organized against the local construction of AI data centers, which have a large power and water footprint and generate heat, noise, and other pollutants. By July 2026, local community resistance had blocked the construction of AI data centers worth some $130 billion.

Between January and August 2024, Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon collectively spent $125 billion on AI data centers. Citigroup forecasted that $2.8 trillion would be spent on AI data centers by 2030, while McKinsey and Company estimated that almost $7 trillion would be spent globally by that time. According to S&P Global, $61 billion has been spent on the data center market as a whole in 2025, while debt issuance for data centers was $182 billion during the same year. Large technology companies have offloaded the financial risks of building AI data centers by setting up special purpose vehicles or by contracting with neoclouds. For example, Meta's Hyperion was mostly funded by Blue Owl Capital, which did so using a bond offering from PIMCO. Those bonds were sold to a number of clients, including BlackRock. Meta did not borrow money itself and instead established a special purpose vehicle from which it would rent the data center. This deal was structured by Morgan Stanley for $30 billion, the largest known private capital transaction as of 2025. Neoclouds such as CoreWeave have gone into debt to buy computer chips from Nvidia for their data centers, and the chips themselves have been used for loan collateral. As of December 2025, CoreWeave took out three GPU-backed loans, collectively worth $12.4 billion, from private credit firms (Blackstone, Coatue, BlackRock, PIMCO) and from banks (Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo). Thus, these companies provide an indirect connection between private credit and established banks. Data centers have also established asset-backed securities, and debt for data centers has its own derivative financial products. The real estate industry, including asset managers, public companies and private investors, has also invested in AI development.

Average AI data centers have an electricity footprint equivalent to 100,000 households, and use billions of gallons of water for cooling their hardware. In 2025, the International Energy Agency estimated that the larger AI data centers currently under construction could consume as much electricity as 2 million households. A 2024 report from the United States Department of Energy stated that data centers overall used 17 billion gallons of water per year in the United States, primarily due to "rapid proliferation of AI servers", and that this usage was forecasted to grow to nearly 80 billion gallons by 2028. Researchers estimated that AI data centers in the United States would emit 24–44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and use 731–1,125 million cubic meters of water per year between 2024 and 2030. Peaking power plants, which have been proposed as a power source for AI data centers, emit sulfur dioxide and have historically been located disproportionately near communities of color in the United States. Reciprocating internal combustion engines, proposed as another power source for a data center, emit PM 2.5, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds.

The construction of AI data centers during the AI boom starting in 2025 has exhausted the global supply of the computer memory. To meet demand from AI servers, the three major DRAM manufacturers, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, prioritized production of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and high-end server DRAM, contributing to a global memory supply shortage and intensifying competition for advanced memory chips. Because HBM consumes far more fabrication capacity than conventional memory—producing a single bit of HBM requires roughly three times the wafer capacity of DDR5. The resulting price increases and shortages have affected computer memory broadly, including HBM, DRAM, and NAND flash memory. Under an agreement with Samsung and SK Hynix, the Stargate project alone is set to receive 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, roughly 40% of total global DRAM production.

In the United States, both the Biden administration and second Trump administration supported the construction of AI data centers. In January 2025, then-president Joe Biden signed an executive order for federal government agencies to support AI data centers on federal sites built by private companies, study their effect on energy prices, and encourage their use of renewable energy. In April 2025, the United States Department of Energy suggested 16 possible sites, including Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In its July 2025 AI Action Plan, the second Trump administration supported increased production of AI data centers. Several US states have incentivized local data center construction. For example, in 2024, lawmakers in Michigan approved tax breaks for data center equipment and construction material. Some data center companies have also invested or promised to invest in the infrastructure of local communities. In December 2025, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen, and Richard Blumenthal wrote to seven technology companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, CoreWeave, Digital Realty, and Equinix) that they will investigate the effects of those companies' operations on consumer energy bills, highlighting AI data centers in particular. That same month, 25 Democratic lawmakers wrote to the inspector general of the United States Department of Commerce over possible conflict of interest concerns involving secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick and AI data centers. Lutnick met with a co-founder of Fermi, which proposed an AI data center project financed by Cantor Fitzgerald and Newmark Group. AI Infrastructure Coalition (AIIC), an organization led by Brian O. Walsh, Kyrsten Sinema, and Garret Graves, has supported Trump's AI Action Plan, with Sinema becoming personally involved in a local meeting on an AI data center in Arizona. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Big Tech companies (Google, Meta, Microsoft), telecommunications companies (Cisco, Corning Inc., Lumen Technologies), data center providers (Digital Realty, QTS), energy companies (Duke Energy, Entergy, ExxonMobil, NextEra Energy), and utility companies (PG&E, Pinnacle West Capital) are members of AIIC as of November 2025. AIIC has been supported by Hogan Lovells. According to Goldman Sachs in 2025 an addition half million workers will be needed by 2030 to build the power infrastructure, which is acute because of AI data center build out. In October 2026 Google says Gemini grew from 400 million to 1 billion users in three months.

Some analysts have expressed concerns about overbuilding of AI data centers, warning that their infrastructure risks obsolescence due to changes in demand and technology. Estimates for the lifespan of the GPUs used to power data centers range from one to eight years. By contrast, CPUs in more traditional data centers have a shelf life of about 5–7 years. Machine learning model training causes significant stress on computer chips.

Advocates have also linked data center construction to the AI bubble. Wisconsin Watch expressed concern that data centers could become stranded assets in the context of an AI bubble, leaving energy customers to pay for the costs. Journalists have warned that the large number of links between actors and organizations in the AI ecosystem as well as the large number of companies involved each indicate strong risks for the global economy and financial markets. A hedge fund founder questioned the economics of AI data centers, concluding that they need about $1 trillion of revenue for profitability. In November 2025, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that building new data centers could negatively affect the electrical grid and cause power outages during extreme weather. The independent monitor of PJM Interconnection warned that its power grid cannot support new data centers and supported a federal moratorium on data centers. Machine learning developers, when training large language models, often use data centers at their full capacity, conflicting with other users (including households) during peak usage, which may lead to blackouts. Power disruptions in data centers can cause errors in machine learning model calculations ("silent data corruption"). Large technology companies who are building data centers have asked public officials and land owners to sign non-disclosure agreements and have appeared to use shell companies. In one case, when a joint OpenAI-Oracle data center was rejected by Saline Township in Michigan, landowners and developers responded by suing the town. The developers acquired the land from the resulting settlement. The Michigan Public Service Commission approved DTE Energy to provide power to the data center, part of Stargate. The approval was part of an ex parte motion, with no public input. In 2025, over 230 groups have signed a letter supporting a moratorium on constructing AI data centers in the United States, concerned by impact on the environment and energy bills. Signatories include Food & Water Watch, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Physicians for Social Responsibility. Senator Bernie Sanders has also supported a moratorium on AI data centers. Ashley LaMont, of Honor the Earth, argued that data centers on tribal lands would not help Native Americans obtain data sovereignty. The NAACP has also expressed opposition to AI data centers.

2. Related Work, Literature Survey & Algorithmic Foundations

Several tech companies, including Starcloud, Google, Nvidia, Blue Origin and SpaceX, have announced projects for or otherwise expressed interest in building data centers in outer space. Google announced Project Suncatcher, which plans to test whether its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips (which are specifically designed for machine learning) can function in the environment of space. The company aims to deploy satellites with these chips in a data center by 2027. In November 2025, Starcloud, a startup supported by Nvidia, launched a satellite with an Nvidia H100 GPU that the company used to deploy and develop a large language model. CNBC reported that this model, NanoGPT, was the first model trained in space. Starcloud deployed a second model based on Google's Gemma.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its subfields have been used in applications throughout industry and academia. Machine learning has been used for various scientific and commercial purposes, including language translation, image recognition, decision-making, credit scoring, and e-commerce. Since the 2020s, massive advancements have been made in the field of generative AI (GenAI) as a result of the 2017 inception of Transformer Model architecture. GenAI has the ability to create text, images, voice, music, videos, and other forms of data from chat-based prompting.

In agriculture, AI has been proposed as a way for farmers to identify areas that need irrigation, fertilization, or pesticide treatments to increase yields, thereby improving efficiency. AI has been used to attempt to classify livestock pig call emotions, automate greenhouses, detect diseases and pests, and optimize irrigation.

A 2019 study found that generative AI increased productivity by 15% in contact centers. Another 2019 study found it increased productivity by up to 40% for writing tasks. An August 2025 review by MIT found that of surveyed companies, 95% did not report any improvement in revenue from the use of AI. In September 2025, a Harvard Business Review article described how increased use of AI does not automatically lead to increases in revenue or actual productivity. Referring to "AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task", the article coined the term workslop. Per studies done in collaboration with the Stanford Social Media Lab, workslop does not improve productivity and undermines trust and collaboration among colleagues. In telehealth, agentic AI is reportedly facilitating the creation of large business models (millions in annual profit) with 1–2 employees, such as MEDVi, which as of August 2025 only had 2 employees and ~$75M in annual profit for GLP-1 weight-loss telehealth services.

Research and development of quantum computers has been performed with machine learning algorithms. For example, there is a prototype, photonic, quantum memristive device for neuromorphic computers (NC)/artificial neural networks and NC-using quantum materials with some variety of potential neuromorphic computing-related applications. The use of quantum machine learning for quantum simulators has been proposed for solving physics and chemistry problems.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are used in electronic design automation to assist with integrated circuit design, including floorplanning, placement, routing, functional verification, and optimization of power, performance, and chip area.

Time sharing Interactive interpreters Graphical user interfaces and the computer mouse Rapid application development environments The linked list data structure Automatic storage management Symbolic programming Functional programming Dynamic programming Object-oriented programming Optical character recognition Constraint satisfaction

3. Dataset Ingestion, Preprocessing & Stochastic Augmentations

AI programs have been used in hiring processes to screen resumes and rank candidates based on their qualifications, predict a candidate's likelihood of success in a given role, and automate repetitive communication tasks using chatbots. Studies on these programs have identified tendencies for gender bias, favoring male names and male-coded characteristics, as well as bias against disabled candidates and racial minorities.

AI underlies avatars (automated online assistants) on web pages. It can reduce operation and training costs. In 2016, Pypestream automated customer service for its mobile application to streamline communication with customers. A Google app analyzes language and converts speech into text. The platform can identify angry customers through their language and respond appropriately. Amazon uses a chatbot for customer service that can perform tasks like checking the status of an order, cancelling orders, offering refunds, and connecting the customer with a human representative.

In educational institutions, AI has been used to automate routine tasks such as attendance tracking, grading, and marking. AI tools have also been used to monitor student progress and analyze learning behaviors, with the goal of facilitating timely interventions for students facing academic challenges. As of 2025 and 2026, respectively, about 80% of high school students and nearly 60% of college students were also using AI. Some schools and universities proposed restrictions on students' usage due to issues with increased cheating, over-reliance on AI tools, and widening of digital inequities.

The U.S. Department of Energy wrote in an April 2024 report that AI may have applications in modeling power grids, reviewing federal permits with large language models (LLMs), predicting levels of renewable energy production, and improving the planning process for electrical vehicle charging networks. Other studies have suggested that machine learning can be used for energy consumption prediction and scheduling (e.g., to help with renewable energy intermittency management).

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw expert systems used in technical and environmental domains. For example, researchers built a fishway design advisor to recommend fish passage structures under varying hydraulic and biological conditions using the VP-Expert shell. Transportation researchers applied the same shell to balance airport capacity with noise-mitigation plans. In agriculture, a potato insect expert system (PIES) supported pest management decisions for Colorado potato beetle. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's CORMIX system for modeling pollutant discharges combined rules with Fortran hydrodynamic models. Autonomous ships that monitor the ocean, AI-driven satellite data analysis, passive acoustics or remote sensing and other applications of environmental monitoring make use of machine learning. For example, "Global Plastic Watch" is an AI-based satellite-monitoring platform for analysis/tracking of plastic waste sites to help with the prevention of plastic pollution—primarily ocean pollution—by helping identify who mismanages plastic waste and where dumping into oceans occurs.

AI applications analyze media content such as movies, TV programs, advertisement videos, and user-generated content. The solutions often involve computer vision. Typical scenarios include the analysis of images using object recognition or facial recognition techniques, or the analysis of video for recognizing scenes, objects, or faces. AI-based media analysis can facilitate media search, the creation of descriptive keywords for content, content policy monitoring (such as verifying the suitability of content for a particular TV viewing time), speech to text for archival or other purposes, and the detection of logos, products, or celebrity faces for ad placement.

Motion interpolation Pixel-art scaling algorithms Image scaling Image restoration Photo colorization Film restoration and video upscaling Photo tagging Text-to-image models (such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion) Image to video Text to video (such as Make-A-Video from Meta, Imagen video and Phenaki from Google) Text to music with AI models (such as MusicLM) Text to speech (such as ElevenLabs and 15.ai) Motion capture

4. Neural Network Backbone, Layer Specifications & Loss Formulations

AI has been used to compose music of various genres. David Cope created an AI called Emily Howell that became well known in the field of algorithmic computer music. The algorithm behind Emily Howell is registered as a US patent. In 2012, AI Iamus created the first complete classical album. AIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist), composes symphonic music, mainly classical music for film scores. It became the first virtual composer to be recognized by a musical professional association. Melomics creates computer-generated music for stress and pain relief. The Watson Beat uses reinforcement learning and deep belief networks to compose music on a simple seed input melody and a select style. The software was open sourced, and musicians such as Taryn Southern collaborated with the project. South Korean singer Hayeon's debut song, "Eyes on You", was composed using AI which was supervised by real composers, including NUVO.

Narrative Science sells computer-generated news and reports. It summarizes sporting events based on statistical data from a game. It also creates financial reports and real estate analyses. Automated Insights generates personalized recaps and previews for Yahoo Sports Fantasy Football. Yseop uses AI to turn structured data into natural language comments and recommendations. It writes financial reports, executive summaries, and personalized sales or marketing documents in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, French, and German. TALESPIN made up stories similar to the fables of Aesop. The program started with a set of characters who wanted to achieve certain goals. Mark Riedl and Vadim Bulitko asserted that the essence of storytelling was experience management, or "how to balance the need for a coherent story progression with user agency, which is often at odds". While AI storytelling focuses on story generation (character and plot), story communication also received attention. In 2002, researchers developed an architectural framework for narrative prose generation. They faithfully reproduced text variety and complexity on stories such as Little Red Riding Hood. In 2016, a Japanese AI co-wrote a short story and almost won a literary prize. South Korean company Hanteo Global uses a journalism bot to write articles. Literary authors are also exploring uses of AI. An example is David Jhave Johnston's work ReRites (2017–2019), where the poet created a daily rite of editing the poetic output of a neural network to create a series of performances and publications.

In video games, AI is routinely used to generate behavior in non-player characters (NPCs). In addition, AI is used for pathfinding. Games with less typical AI include the AI director of Left 4 Dead (2008) and the neuroevolutionary training of platoons in Supreme Commander 2 (2010). In the 21st century, AIs have beaten human players in many games, including chess (Deep Blue), Jeopardy! (Watson), Go (AlphaGo), poker (Pluribus and Cepheus), E-sports (StarCraft), and general game playing (AlphaZero and MuZero). Kuki AI is a set of chatbots and other apps which were designed for entertainment and as a marketing tool.

The first AI art program, AARON, was developed by Harold Cohen in 1968 with the goal of being able to code the act of drawing. It started by creating simple black and white drawings, and later to painting using special brushes and dyes chosen by the program without mediation from Cohen. AI platforms such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Imagen, and Midjourney have been used for generating visual images from inputs such as text or other images. Some AI tools allow users to input images and output changed versions, such as to display an object or product in different environments. AI image models can also attempt to replicate the specific styles of artists, and can add visual complexity to rough sketches. AI has been used to generate quantitative analysis of existing digital art collections. Two computational methods, close reading and distant viewing, are typical approaches used to analyze digitized art. While distant viewing includes the analysis of large collections, close reading involves one piece of artwork.

Banks use AI to organize operations for bookkeeping, investing in stocks, and managing properties. AI can adapt to changes during non-business hours.

The use of AI in applications such as online trading and decision-making has changed major economic theories. For example, AI-based buying and selling platforms estimate personalized demand and supply curves, thus enabling individualized pricing. AI systems reduce information asymmetry in the market and thus make markets more efficient. The application of AI in the financial industry can help alleviate financing constraints of non-state-owned enterprises, especially for smaller and more innovative enterprises. Large financial institutions use AI to assist with their investment practices. BlackRock's AI engine, Aladdin, is used both within the company and by clients to help with investment decisions. Its functions include the use of natural language processing to analyze text such as news, broker reports, and social media feeds. It then gauges the sentiment on the companies mentioned and assigns a score. Banks such as UBS and Deutsche Bank use SQREEM (Sequential Quantum Reduction and Extraction Model) to mine data to develop consumer profiles and match them with wealth management products.

AI in healthcare is often used for classification, such as to evaluate a CT scan or electrocardiogram or to identify high-risk patients for population health. Additional potential applications like robot-assisted surgery, virtual nursing assistants, and dosage error reductions could create billions in annual savings for U.S. health care. For certain disorders and diseases, AI algorithms can aid in diagnosis, recommended treatments, outcome prediction, and patient progress tracking. Early detection of diseases like cancer is made possible by AI algorithms, which diagnose diseases by analyzing complex sets of medical data. For example, Microsoft's AI project Hanover helps doctors choose cancer treatments from among the more than 800 medicines and vaccines. Studies have shown AI capable of identifying skin cancers and diagnosing eye conditions, similar to an ophthalmologist, and recommending treatment referrals via transfer learning. Another project monitors multiple high-risk patients by asking each patient questions based on data acquired from doctor/patient interactions. Artificial neural networks are used as clinical decision support systems for medical diagnosis, such as in concept processing technology in electronic medical record (EMR) software. Other healthcare tasks thought suitable for an AI that are in development include:

5. Training Protocol, Convergence Behavior & Experimental Evaluation

Screening Companion robots for elder care Drug creation (e.g. by identifying candidate drugs and by using existing drug screening data such as in life extension research) Clinical training Identifying genomic pathogen signatures of novel pathogens or identifying pathogens via physics-based fingerprints (including pandemic pathogens) Helping link genes to their functions, otherwise analyzing genes and identification of novel biological targets Help development of biomarkers Help tailor therapies to individuals in personalized medicine/precision medicine

AI-enabled chatbots decrease the need for humans to perform basic call center tasks, and machine learning in sentiment analysis can spot fatigue to prevent overwork. Decision support systems can potentially prevent industrial disasters and make disaster response more efficient. For manual workers in material handling, predictive analytics has been proposed to reduce musculoskeletal injury. AI can attempt to process workers' compensation claims. AI has been proposed for detection of accident near misses, which are underreported.

Speech translation technology attempts to convert one language into another. This could potentially reduce language barriers in global commerce and cross-cultural exchange, enabling speakers of various languages to communicate. AI has been used to automatically translate spoken language and textual content in products like Microsoft Translator, Google Translate, and DeepL Translator. Also, research and development are in progress to decode and conduct animal communication. Meaning is conveyed not only by text, but also through usage and context (see semantics and pragmatics). As a result, the two primary categorization approaches for machine translations are statistical machine translation (SMT) and neural machine translations (NMTs). The old method of performing translation was to use statistical methodology to forecast the best probable output with specific algorithms. However, with NMT, the approach employs dynamic algorithms to achieve better translations based on context.

AI facial recognition systems are used for mass surveillance, notably in China. In 2019, Bengaluru, India deployed AI-managed traffic signals that uses cameras to monitor traffic density and adjust signal timing based on the interval needed to clear traffic.

In the 1990s, early AI tools controlled toys like Aibo, a domestic robot in the form of a robotic dog with intelligent features and autonomy. In the mid-2010s, Mattel's Hello Barbie could "understand" conversations, give intelligent responses, and remember. AI in toys could offer personalized learning. However, in May 2026, after early tests to see how toddlers interact with AI, researchers called for tighter regulation on AI-powered toys. Similarly, nonprofit organization Common Sense Media warned against children under five using AI.

AI tools have been used to translate mathematical proofs into formal proofs to automatically verify them.

AI systems have also been used to search for improved algorithms and computational routines. AlphaTensor, AlphaDev, and AlphaEvolve have been applied to matrix multiplication algorithms, sorting routines, and broader scientific and algorithmic discovery.