The Planetary Cost of AI Acceleration: A Thermodynamic Outlook on Four Possible Paths Forward

William Yicheng Zhu; Lei Zhu

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arXiv · 2603.28949

The Planetary Cost of AI Acceleration: A Thermodynamic Outlook on Four Possible Paths Forward

William Yicheng Zhu·Lei Zhu

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Abstract

The artificial intelligence industry is not an isolated economic phenomenon; it is the current physical substrate for a broader, multi-billion-year process: the evolution of an abstract intelligence on Earth. As the scale of computation accelerates planetary-wide, the academic and popular discourse must address the physics aspect of this phase transition, beyond algorithmic architectures, alignment, and silicon supply chains. From first principles, it is clear that if the current exponential trajectory of computation holds, the ultimate bottleneck of the coming decades will be neither data nor capital, but the laws of thermodynamics and the finite heat capacity of the Earth. The evolution of intelligence is fundamentally a problem of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, bound by strict hardware limitations, and ultimately, an absolute ecological boundary condition. Civilization itself is an exceedingly rare and highly expensive thermodynamic algorithm actively fighting the default settings of the cosmos. To better understand AI's future and our future, we must rigorously examine the physical laws governing computation, complexity theory, and the narrow thermodynamic tightrope our civilization must walk to survive it

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William Yicheng Zhu, Lei Zhu. 2026-03-30. The Planetary Cost of AI Acceleration: A Thermodynamic Outlook on Four Possible Paths Forward. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28949

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