It's not just training AI models that's demanding exponentially increasing compute power, but also streaming, storing, and processing the enormous amounts of scientific data coming from (for example) high-end physics experiments at world-class laboratories like CERN or the LHC, and there's also the tremendous amounts of surveillance data and data processing that's sprung up in recent decades, with an insatiable appetite of various agencies and companies to track, record, and analyze everyone and everything.
True, but from what people were telling me before I left university, scientific processing always produced more data than could be analysed, even after accounting for the effort put into efficient algorithms.
