5 ms·

The original press release and report are at [1], couldn't find a link to them in the article. > In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of th

The original press release and report are at [1], couldn't find a link to them in the article. > In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity If they're running on, say, two RTX 6000s for a total draw of ~600 watts, that would be a response time of 1.44 seconds. So obviously the median prompt doesn't go to some high-end thinking model users have to pay for. It's a very low number; for comparison, an electric vehicle might consume 82kWh to travel 363 miles. So that 0.24 watt-hours of energy is equivalent to driving 5.6 feet (1.7 meters) in such an EV. When I hear reports that AI power demand is overloading electricity infrastructure, it always makes me think: Even before the AI boom, shouldn't we have a bunch of extra capacity under construction, ready for EV driving, induction stoves and heat-pump heating? [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measuring-the-environmental-impact-of-ai-inference https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measur...

coldtea 1y ago
>Even before the AI boom, shouldn't we have a bunch of extra capacity under construction, ready for EV driving, induction stoves and heat-pump heating? When it comes to the EV, the answer is simple: the EV takeover "by 2030" was 100% wishful thinking - the capacity is nowhere near there, starting from scaling the battery production, never mind the charge capacity.
- lucketone 1y ago
  While it was never going happen. Existence of “2030 deadline” was/ is significant factor by itself. (Current sate would be less electrified without that arbitrary and over optimistic fantasy deadline)
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  No, mostly misunderstanding. ~95% of all cars sold in Norway are EV, yet only ~25% of the cars on the road are EV's. Most cars predate the EV transition. It'll take another ~20 years until the 95% of the cars on the road are EV's. We'll have the battery capacity and charge capacity to allow 100% of cars sold in 2030 to be EV's. We only need 2 capacity doublings for batteries, and currently doublings happen every ~18 months. Charge capacity is even easier, we just need to increase electricity production by 1-2% per year for a couple decades to support the transition to EV's.
  - coldtea 1y ago
    >No, mostly misunderstanding. ~95% of all cars sold in Norway are EV, yet only ~25% of the cars on the road are EV's Norway is a tiny market which had big artificial tax/cost incentives to buy an EV. Norway could be 100% EV and it wouldn't make any dent to global adoption.
    - bryanlarsen 1y ago
      Norway is a tiny market that is an example of what most Western nations will look like in 2030 or 2035. Despite ~95% of sales being EV, downtown Oslo is still noisy and stinky because the vast majority of cars are still ICE. Contrast with China -- downtown Shanghai has the vast majority of cars being EV's despite the EV sales rate in China only being ~50%.
- unethical_ban 1y ago
  That seems irrelevant to the question. If I took your prompt, my response would be "do you suggest we should run on thin margins of transmission capacity while we watch an explosion of demand coming at us?"
- dzhiurgis 1y ago
  AFAIK there has been oversupply of batteries for last few years
  - coldtea 1y ago
    If you forecast 100, build 20, and sell 10, you have oversupply for the caving in of demand, but huge lack of supply compared to the never-arriving extrapolated demand
moi2388 1y ago
Should we? Yes. Do we? Nope. China however is continuously providing double the energy they currently require, only to notice that every two years or so it actually did end up getting used.
gcr 1y ago
That's just a press release. Here's the actual PDF of the actual tech report: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_environmental_impact_of_delivering_ai_at_google_scale.pdf https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi...
- gamerdonkey 1y ago
  I don't know why, but it always irks me when a corporation puts out a document like this cosplaying as peer-reviewed research, and they don't bother to put in even a lip-service "conflict of interest" disclosure. I should expect it at this point.
chickenbig 1y ago
> When I hear reports that AI power demand is overloading electricity infrastructure ... It feels like dog-whistle tactics. "Aren't the technology companies bad for the environment!" "What about the water usage?" "What about the electricity?" For me the peak of this is complaining about water consumption at the Dalles datacentre [0]. The buildings are next to the Colombia river and a few miles away from the Dalles Dam [1] which generates an average of 700MW. The river water should be used for cooling, taking out some of the water, warming it up by a few degrees and returning it to the river; one might argue that this is simply returning the heat to the river that would have come from the water flowing downhill. [0] https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-water-use-is-soaring-in-the-dalles-records-show-with-two-more-data-centers-to-come.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-wa... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dalles_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dalles_Dam
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  The term "water consumption" makes people think the water is destroyed, which is probably a large part of the controversy.
  - thmsths 1y ago
    Because in most cases it kind of is. It's not that the H2O molecules are forcefully disintegrated, but most data centers use evaporative cooling, meaning that whatever water is fed to the datacenter through the municipal water system ends up as moisture in the atmosphere. This is in effect equivalent to a sizable leak in the water infrastructure.
    - richwater 1y ago
      > This is in effect equivalent to a sizable leak in the water infrastructure. Where do you think the evaporated water goes?
    - danielbln 1y ago
      Doesn't it come back down as rain?
GaggiX 1y ago
>~If they're running on, say, two RTX 6000s for a total draw of ~600 watts, that would be a response time of 1.44 seconds. So obviously the median prompt doesn't go to some high-end thinking model users have to pay for. You're not accounting for batches for the optimal gpu utilization, maybe it can takes 30 seconds but it completed 30 requests.
oulipo2 1y ago
I'm not sure why they would report on the median prompt, and not the average, which would give a better sense of (well average) consumption in this case
- sceptic123 1y ago
  Median is _an_ average, are you wanting a mean consumption perhaps when you say average?
  - Capricorn2481 1y ago
    Well first of all, you're implying this measures our consumption at all. But it's left completely vague what this is a median of. They said "A point-in-time analysis quantified the energy consumed per median Gemini App text-generation prompt, considering data from May 2025". Considering what data? All queries sent to Gemini? Real users? A select few? Test queries from Google? Does it include AI summaries of google searches? Because if the data includes stuff as simple as "How tall is Lee Pace," that is obviously going to bring the median query down, even if the top distribution is using many times more energy. But still, the median is not useful by itself. It tells us 50% of the queries measured were under 0.24Wh. It obviously obscures policy-relevant information to not include the mean, but it also obscures what I can do individually without more details on the data. Where am I on this median? It makes the most sense to provide the entire distribution and examples of data points.
    - sceptic123 1y ago
      I'm not implying anything other than there's a tendency to lazy use of the word average
- klabb3 1y ago
  100%, and I say that as someone who often think average is misleading, but in this case it makes no sense to report median (unless you are working at Google and trying to chase tail usage). > I'm not sure why they would report on the median The why is an easier question. They probably picked the lower of the two numbers because it lies in their interest to state they are energy efficient.
unethical_ban 1y ago
Yes we should, which is yet another example of ineffective vision from the prior administration and outright incompetence and sabotage by the current one, regarding renewables and transmission infrastructure.
tzs 1y ago
> When I hear reports that AI power demand is overloading electricity infrastructure, it always makes me think: Even before the AI boom, shouldn't we have a bunch of extra capacity under construction, ready for EV driving, induction stoves and heat-pump heating? One of the problems might be that a data center puts a lot of demand into a small area and it needs that power soon. Those other things are being phased in over time, so we only need modest annual capacity growth to deal with them, and they are spread out.

coldtea 1y ago

>Even before the AI boom, shouldn't we have a bunch of extra capacity under construction, ready for EV driving, induction stoves and heat-pump heating? When it comes to the EV, the answer is simple: the EV takeover "by 2030" was 100% wishful thinking - the capacity is nowhere near there, starting from scaling the battery production, never mind the charge capacity.

lucketone 1y ago
While it was never going happen. Existence of “2030 deadline” was/ is significant factor by itself. (Current sate would be less electrified without that arbitrary and over optimistic fantasy deadline)
bryanlarsen 1y ago
No, mostly misunderstanding. ~95% of all cars sold in Norway are EV, yet only ~25% of the cars on the road are EV's. Most cars predate the EV transition. It'll take another ~20 years until the 95% of the cars on the road are EV's. We'll have the battery capacity and charge capacity to allow 100% of cars sold in 2030 to be EV's. We only need 2 capacity doublings for batteries, and currently doublings happen every ~18 months. Charge capacity is even easier, we just need to increase electricity production by 1-2% per year for a couple decades to support the transition to EV's.
- coldtea 1y ago
  >No, mostly misunderstanding. ~95% of all cars sold in Norway are EV, yet only ~25% of the cars on the road are EV's Norway is a tiny market which had big artificial tax/cost incentives to buy an EV. Norway could be 100% EV and it wouldn't make any dent to global adoption.
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    Norway is a tiny market that is an example of what most Western nations will look like in 2030 or 2035. Despite ~95% of sales being EV, downtown Oslo is still noisy and stinky because the vast majority of cars are still ICE. Contrast with China -- downtown Shanghai has the vast majority of cars being EV's despite the EV sales rate in China only being ~50%.
unethical_ban 1y ago
That seems irrelevant to the question. If I took your prompt, my response would be "do you suggest we should run on thin margins of transmission capacity while we watch an explosion of demand coming at us?"
dzhiurgis 1y ago
AFAIK there has been oversupply of batteries for last few years
- coldtea 1y ago
  If you forecast 100, build 20, and sell 10, you have oversupply for the caving in of demand, but huge lack of supply compared to the never-arriving extrapolated demand

moi2388 1y ago

Should we? Yes. Do we? Nope. China however is continuously providing double the energy they currently require, only to notice that every two years or so it actually did end up getting used.

gcr 1y ago

That's just a press release. Here's the actual PDF of the actual tech report: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_environmental_impact_of_delivering_ai_at_google_scale.pdf https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi...

gamerdonkey 1y ago
I don't know why, but it always irks me when a corporation puts out a document like this cosplaying as peer-reviewed research, and they don't bother to put in even a lip-service "conflict of interest" disclosure. I should expect it at this point.

chickenbig 1y ago

> When I hear reports that AI power demand is overloading electricity infrastructure ... It feels like dog-whistle tactics. "Aren't the technology companies bad for the environment!" "What about the water usage?" "What about the electricity?" For me the peak of this is complaining about water consumption at the Dalles datacentre [0]. The buildings are next to the Colombia river and a few miles away from the Dalles Dam [1] which generates an average of 700MW. The river water should be used for cooling, taking out some of the water, warming it up by a few degrees and returning it to the river; one might argue that this is simply returning the heat to the river that would have come from the water flowing downhill. [0] https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-water-use-is-soaring-in-the-dalles-records-show-with-two-more-data-centers-to-come.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-wa... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dalles_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dalles_Dam

BurningFrog 1y ago
The term "water consumption" makes people think the water is destroyed, which is probably a large part of the controversy.
- thmsths 1y ago
  Because in most cases it kind of is. It's not that the H2O molecules are forcefully disintegrated, but most data centers use evaporative cooling, meaning that whatever water is fed to the datacenter through the municipal water system ends up as moisture in the atmosphere. This is in effect equivalent to a sizable leak in the water infrastructure.
  - richwater 1y ago
    > This is in effect equivalent to a sizable leak in the water infrastructure. Where do you think the evaporated water goes?
  - danielbln 1y ago
    Doesn't it come back down as rain?

GaggiX 1y ago

>~If they're running on, say, two RTX 6000s for a total draw of ~600 watts, that would be a response time of 1.44 seconds. So obviously the median prompt doesn't go to some high-end thinking model users have to pay for. You're not accounting for batches for the optimal gpu utilization, maybe it can takes 30 seconds but it completed 30 requests.

oulipo2 1y ago

I'm not sure why they would report on the median prompt, and not the average, which would give a better sense of (well average) consumption in this case

sceptic123 1y ago
Median is _an_ average, are you wanting a mean consumption perhaps when you say average?
- Capricorn2481 1y ago
  Well first of all, you're implying this measures our consumption at all. But it's left completely vague what this is a median of. They said "A point-in-time analysis quantified the energy consumed per median Gemini App text-generation prompt, considering data from May 2025". Considering what data? All queries sent to Gemini? Real users? A select few? Test queries from Google? Does it include AI summaries of google searches? Because if the data includes stuff as simple as "How tall is Lee Pace," that is obviously going to bring the median query down, even if the top distribution is using many times more energy. But still, the median is not useful by itself. It tells us 50% of the queries measured were under 0.24Wh. It obviously obscures policy-relevant information to not include the mean, but it also obscures what I can do individually without more details on the data. Where am I on this median? It makes the most sense to provide the entire distribution and examples of data points.
  - sceptic123 1y ago
    I'm not implying anything other than there's a tendency to lazy use of the word average
klabb3 1y ago
100%, and I say that as someone who often think average is misleading, but in this case it makes no sense to report median (unless you are working at Google and trying to chase tail usage). > I'm not sure why they would report on the median The why is an easier question. They probably picked the lower of the two numbers because it lies in their interest to state they are energy efficient.

unethical_ban 1y ago

Yes we should, which is yet another example of ineffective vision from the prior administration and outright incompetence and sabotage by the current one, regarding renewables and transmission infrastructure.

tzs 1y ago

> When I hear reports that AI power demand is overloading electricity infrastructure, it always makes me think: Even before the AI boom, shouldn't we have a bunch of extra capacity under construction, ready for EV driving, induction stoves and heat-pump heating? One of the problems might be that a data center puts a lot of demand into a small area and it needs that power soon. Those other things are being phased in over time, so we only need modest annual capacity growth to deal with them, and they are spread out.