Energy Is the Foundation of Every Digital Addition

Energy is the foundation of every digital addition.

That’s what Antonio Coutinho, the CEO of EDP Innovation, said in a presentation at the Web Summit event in Lisbon, Portugal, on Tuesday, which was attended by Rigzone.

“The next century will be powered by volts, amps, and watts … AI’s future depends on the electrons that we can generate and deliver … energy is the new bandwidth,” he added.

In the presentation, Coutinho pointed out that “we are always talking about AI” and said “every company wants to be an AI company”. He went on to question, however, if we can “afford to have the energy to support all this consumption”, adding that “there is a hidden cost dependency that we usually don’t talk about that much, which is about energy”.

“Behind every prompt, every inference, every image, there is always a transformer, a copper line, and a generation asset – and no energy, no intelligence,” Coutinho said in the presentation.

“Behind every GPU cluster, there is a transformer that makes this possible … energy needs infrastructure and we are starting to see this tension between energy and digital,” he added.

Coutinho stated in his presentation that, since 2014, AI compute has grown 350,000 times. Generation assets have grown only 1.6 times during the same period, he pointed out.

“So digital is scaling exponentially but the physics of the energy just go incrementally,” he said.

“There is the need of steel, copper, and people and time to make this happen. You cannot copy paste a gigawatt … So the exponential is meeting the physical bottlenecks and the bottlenecks are already visible around the energy system,” he added.

In his presentation, Coutinho highlighted that “each hyperscale data center needs around 300-500 megawatts of power”.

“This is [a] medium sized power plant. If you think about cooling and redundancy, this is even double the amount of demand,” he said.

According to his social media, Coutinho has been CEO of EDP Innovation since January 2021. Coutinho’s social media shows that he also serves as President of Associação Portuguesa da Energia, which describes itself on social media as the Portuguese Member Committee of the World Energy Council.

In a separate presentation at the Web Summit, which was also attended by Rigzone, David Savage – Harvey Nash Group Tech Evangelist and host of the global podcast Tech Talks – said “AI is rightly the topic of so many different stages” at the 2025 Web Summit and added that “it’s accelerating opportunity faster than ever”.

He warned, however, that “it’s colliding head on with a physical force – power”.

“Every prompt we type, every token we generate, every model we train, it costs real, finite power,” he stated.

Savage is described in a Web Summit bio page as “a top tech influencer, speaker, [and] moderator”.

Web Summit 2025 is taking place from November 10-13. According to the event’s website, this year’s Web Summit is hosting 71,386 attendees from 157 countries.

“2,725 startups, from 108 countries, will be exhibiting, with AI and machine learning emerging as the top industry,” the site states, adding that “268 government delegations are joining from 82 countries”.

EDP describes itself on its website as a global energy leader with presence in Europe, North America, South America, and Asia Pacific.

“The company operates across four primary platforms (Renewable Generation Assets, Networks, Client Solutions and Global Energy Management), counting on the talent of nearly 12,000 employees worldwide,” EDP’s site notes.

“The group is one of the largest producers in the world featuring a global and distinctive portfolio of assets in onshore and offshore wind and solar, as well as hydro, with a total installed capacity of 32 gigawatts,” it adds.

“EDP is proud of being one of the greenest utilities in the world, already generating around 90 percent of its energy from renewable sources,” it continues.

To contact the author, email andreas.exarheas@rigzone.com