Qualcomm CMO on AI and cloud: “Hybrid approach will win the day”

Every time a query is made, be it in the form of a user googling Taylor Swift concert tickets or asking ChatGPT for an AI-generated rendition of “Shake It Off”, a request gets sent off to a data centre somewhere in the world. To the user, that request and the answer it returns, are invisible; they are part of the fabric making the internet work.

Yet, that request ultimately costs energy. Data centres require vast amounts of water and electricity to run. When you think of the trillions of queries happening every year, you get a better appreciation of the impact that technology might be having on the planet.

Generative AI is bound to pile on that cost even more. Some studies suggest that generative image creation is more taxing than charging a cell phone (as we noted in our article about bias in AI).

This then begs the question: how can it all be sustainable?

Qualcomm highlights hybrid cloud

During a CMO Insights event hosted at CES 2024, panellists were asked for their predictions on how AI would transform digital marketing in 2024 and beyond.

Among them was Don McGuire, Senior Vice President and CMO at Qualcomm, who predicted that hybrid cloud will play a key role in addressing not just the sustainability associated with AI but also the performance aspect.

He pointed out that as chips become more powerful, answers to queries will begun to be answered locally on your device, be it your smartphone, your car or your TV.

“Not all traffic workloads can to the cloud for every single query, because you’d just tank data centres and it’s not sustainable. Water and power issues would occur. But there’s devices and chips – such as the Snapdragon – that are powerful to handle queries within a certain number of parameters. This hybrid approach is going to win the day.”

A prediction close to home

This prediction for 2024 is not entirely a surprise coming from Qualcomm. After all, the aforementioned Snapdragon chips are designed and marketed by Qualcomm themselves, who’d naturally stand to gain from devices becoming more powerful and capable of handling increasing volumes of queries locally.

But while that prediction is slightly self serving, it is still honest in that it aligns with where the market seems to be headed. In a recent AMD event, Senior Product Marketing Manager Wendy Wong heralded the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U, which has AI skills built in, as a chip with the potential to push people from the cloud to local machines.

For AI, perhaps hybrid cloud might, indeed, win the day.