By: Andreas Kuehn and Cauvery Ganapathy
The following excerpt is from Chapter 1 — Building AI into the Energy Future of ORF Global Quarterly: Energy and Tech: Powering the Future.
The appeal of artificial intelligence (AI) to the Global South lies in its potential to narrow persistent structural gaps that constrain human and economic development. Across these geographies, large sections of the population grapple with the interconnected challenges of lack of clean water, food insecurity, limited access to affordable and quality healthcare, financial exclusion, and inadequate economic opportunities. Structural barriers to energy access aggravate each of these pressures, while climate change further strains the fragile ecosystems within countries that are simultaneously pursuing industrial decarbonisation agendas while seeking to reduce inequities in energy access and development. By improving productivity across critical sectors, optimising energy access and distribution, and strengthening climate change mitigation techniques, an effective, equitable, and calibrated diffusion of AI could help alleviate these pressures across the Global South.
The widespread adoption of AI, alongside efforts to address developmental gaps, holds economic and business potential for countries of the Global South. This embrace will, however, also impart a significant footprint on global energy and climate ecosystems, as energy is a core enabler of the AI revolution. Simultaneously, AI itself could also serve as a system-level facilitator to address concerns of reliability and compromised efficiency in energy ecosystems. Yet, while the integration of AI offers benefits for the optimisation of energy systems through grid management, renewable energy integration, predictive maintenance, and accurate forecasting of alternative forms of energy, its energy-intensive nature could also negatively impact the countries and ecosystems seeking to adopt it.
Across the Global South, AI ambitions are unfolding alongside efforts to expand energy access and modernize power systems. Learn more about how these priorities are beginning to converge — and what that means for long-term development in ORF Global Quarterly: Energy and Tech: Powering the Future.