5 ms·

How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?

73 points by surprisetalk 3mo ago

ch4s3 3mo ago
I think its easy to forget how much energy is required to boil a liter of water, and these charts are a great reminder of the mundane things like that which escape our attention.
DenisM 3mo ago
Select quote: * 5% of electricity in the United States is used to power data centers. For AI-focused ones specifically, it’s probably around 2%.* I think it’s massive.
- gruez 3mo ago
  >I think it’s massive. So what about the other 3%? That's not "massive"? Or it gets a pass because it's not AI? The whole debate over datacenter resource consumption feels like a rorschach test. Either you think the technology is transformative and therefore the resource consumption is justified, or you think it's slop and therefore any resource consumption can't be justified.
  - dundarious 3mo ago
    If it was 2% for VOD streaming, and 3% for every other service that is delivered by a networked computer, I would think "wow, streaming is huge". 2% for one thing that most people hardly use at all, versus 3% for everything else on the computer, is still a remarkable statistic. I'm not making any value judgment in order to say that. I also don't think it's particularly conclusive about anything though. It doesn't on its face make me think anything like "it must be stopped", but it's remarkable.
    - sroussey 3mo ago
      > 2% for one thing that most people hardly use at all AI is hardly used at all? Basically every company and consumer in the country is using it, transitively if not directly.
      - dundarious 3mo ago
        Every company is using it? The deli and the laundromat too? Every consumer? Maybe transitively because they use Google or what have you, but most people I know still don't really know what AI is, never mind have a puritan revulsion over using it (some people are quite performative about this on here), but they just don't use it themselves, except transitively on occasion.
        sroussey 3mo ago
        Everyone using Google. Watching Netflix. Listening to Spotify. Shopping at Amazon or a Shopify store. Or reading almost anything these days. :( Advertising they see. Using a credit card, writing a check. Beam forming wireless signals. It’s everywhere. Not all AI is an LLM.
        dundarious 3mo ago
        Was the 2% figure counting all those things? I don't think so. This is changing the grounds of the discussion. Ridiculously so. Do you take me for some zealot who hates tensors or matrices or something? I don't even hate LLMs, though I have huge issues with how data has been gathered. I feel like this discussion is useless.
        sroussey 3mo ago
        Look at Meta’s capital budget and tell me people aren’t using AI. People use Facebook, Instagram, etc. I’d say the same for Google, but with Google Cloud it’s hard to know where the dollars are going and for whom. Who exactly is the 2% figure? Can’t all be HN people on side projects using Claude code.
    - gruez 3mo ago
      >that most people hardly use at all Speak for yourself. For "most people", "streaming" is basically TV for them, and the average american watches 2.6 hours per day[1]. It's probably safe to say that at least half of that is "streaming" of some sort, even more if you include other types of "streaming" like music streaming. Moreover nowadays even if they're not plopped in front of a TV, they're watching short form videos. [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm
      - dundarious 3mo ago
        I was referring to AI in that statement, I wrote it somewhat poorly.
        gruez 3mo ago
        The "hardly use" comparison quickly runs into issues, though. If I use AI and it completes a job that would have taken an hour in 1 minute, should that be counted as a factor against AI, because I'm "hardly" using it (1 minute) compared to the alternative (1 hour)?
        dundarious 3mo ago
        It was written in a specific context: > [AI] that most people hardly use at all and while ambiguous, I meant that quantifying the number of people that use it, results in a not large number. I've had discussions in other threads about how to talk about transitive use, etc., so as with everything at all times, there are certainly ways to skin the cat that justify or invalidate the statement. One has to rely upon good judgment to decide which way is best, and reasonable people may disagree.
  - DenisM 3mo ago
    > So what about the other 3%? That's not "massive"? Or it gets a pass because it's not AI? How did you read that in my comment?
  - everdrive 3mo ago
    By all means, cull them all. I'm sure the remaining 3% support (in one way or another) terrible web apps that use 150 MB of javascript and data brokers.
- eddyg 3mo ago
  What's massive is the amount of water used for a handful of almonds. Not daily AI use. https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/ https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/
lopis 3mo ago
The author claims it's surprising that AI uses less electricity than the rest of data centers. Why?? Data centers do a million different things other than AI
- StrauXX 3mo ago
  AI hardware is much, much more powerhungry than traditional processors though. I can understand their reasoning.
  - lopis 3mo ago
    Sure, but it's still surprising that 1/3 of all data centers in the whole world are dedicated to that one use.
- Aurornis 3mo ago
  It's surprising because that's all anyone hears about right now. Many are surprised to learn that data centers use much less water than golf courses or pools. We hear about it so much in the news it sounds like it's the overwhelming largest consumption problem around.
  - axus 3mo ago
    If they use so little water and power, why aren't they being built in the empty office buildings? Seems like commercial real estate was made for ... commercial activity.
    - rick_dalton 3mo ago
      This makes no sense? How is one even correlated with the other? Data centers obviously have much different requirements than office buildings for people. On a very small scale this works but not on a larger scale.
    - fxwin 3mo ago
      Nobody is saying that they use "so little water and power", just that the average person has no clue about the orders of magnitude at which anything outside of a private household uses these things, including things they previously didn't really have a problem with (like golf courses or almond farms) Most people just hear <gigantic number of m³ or kWh> and their brain goes "damn, that must be a lot, i don't use nearly that much at home"
xnx 3mo ago
Our World in Data is great, but this article would've been improved if it offered a chart that offered a comparison to it's leading "1.5% of global electricity number". For example: 7% to 10% of all global electricity is consumed by air conditioning. It's not hard to think of relatively small interventions that could save 1.5% of global energy use annually.
- ggreer 3mo ago
  Increasing global electricity production by 1.5% (or 500 terawatt-hours) would also be a solution. Production from solar power increased by 600TWh from 2024-2025 and its rate of adoption is increasing as costs go down, so this doesn't seem like a problem worth worrying about.
  - paulhebert 3mo ago
    The problem is we need to be reducing our use of highly polluting energy sources and shifting to renewable sources. The more our energy use increases the harder it is to do so.
  - RetroTechie 3mo ago
    Going by those figures, would mean that AI datacenters built so far, consume enough energy to undo almost a year of solar power buildout. AND growing like crazy. That's running costs. Not energy going into a building's construction or fabrication of the gear going in there. Does seem like a problem worth worrying about.
    - yellowapple 3mo ago
      The obvious solution here is for datacenter buildouts to include the power generation necessary for them to operate. Here in Nevada that's exactly what quite a few of the larger datacenter companies (Switch, Google, Apple, etc.) have been doing, whether by outright building solar farms themselves or by signing PPAs with geothermal companies like Ormat. That's indeed how these companies are able to advertise their datacenters as powered by “100% renewables” despite NV Energy's grid power mix including non-renewables (namely natural gas).
shipman05 3mo ago
I'm dismayed by the current political discourse on this topic. Seems like the two camps are 1) let mega corps build data centers with impunity or 2) use NIMBY tactics to oppose them in all cases. I want to see a pro-growth approach that makes the mega corps assume the costs of their negative externalities. I want to see an increased build out of renewable and nuclear energy sources. I want to see environmental protections in place to limit impacts on aquifers and other water sources. Democracies don't handle nuance well.
- jjulius 3mo ago
  >Democracies don't handle nuance well. Especially when modern discourse revolves around 140-character hot takes.
  - bakies 3mo ago
    And Instagram reels. Mine is so full of anti-green-energy propaganda I uninstalled the app.
    - penr0se 3mo ago
      Instagram's algorithm is based on what you interact the most with (even stopping to watch the reel, to read comments or to write one counts as interacting). You can start marking all that content as "Not interesting" and in the worst case just blocking those profiles to fix your feed and algorithm (or even go to your settings and tweak your interests directly). But uninstalling the app is never a bad choice regardless
      - bakies 3mo ago
        Yeah I started blocking and gave up
      - no-name-here 3mo ago
        One more option - you can also reset your algorithm in the IG settings.
lordnacho 3mo ago
I presume running an electric shower includes heating up the water? Otherwise I don't understand how it could be so energy intensive. The energy is the mgh of the water lifted, plus the heat you put into it. Heat tends to be by far bigger in that calculation unless I've missed something.
- shipman05 3mo ago
  Yes. They're likely referring to on-demand electric heating units that are installed near the shower head. Our World in Data is based in the UK. Electric showers like this one https://www.mirashowers.co.uk/p/showers/shop-electric-showers https://www.mirashowers.co.uk/p/showers/shop-electric-shower... are more common there than they are in the US.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
chrisgd 3mo ago
We all just look at energy as a price. I think more people are concerned if our prices will go up, not how much energy it uses. The bigger question is water. How much water do they use? Is it potable to begin with? Is it usable after? Will they drive prices up. These are one time builds with minimal jobs created after for a tech that could end my career. If I lose my job, I don’t also want to have no water and higher bills.
- ggreer 3mo ago
  The talk about AI water usage exists because in Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, she got water usage wrong by three orders of magnitude.[1] For data centers that use water cooling, it's almost always non-potable water, and it's usually returned to the body of water it was pumped out of (though slightly warmer). If you're worried about water consumption, things like golf courses and farm subsidies for water-intensive crops are much bigger issues. 1. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...
simonw 3mo ago
> For longer queries or requests that rely on AI agents or reasoning, the footprint is higher. Epoch AI estimated that a long query (7,500 words of input) could consume about 2.5 Wh, and a very long one (75,000 words) could consume 40 Wh. Those are far higher than the simple text query. One thing that's missing from almost all of these energy estimates is the impact of "agentic" queries, which were rare a year ago and increasingly common today. I've asked questions of GPT-5.6 Pro that take 19 minutes to return an answer, as the model runs hundreds of search and site navigation tool calls (and a bit of executed Python code too) trying to get to a credible answer. I'm confident that 19 minutes involves a lot more than 75,000 words worth of tokens. With coding agents we can at least get an accurate token count. I'm already at 204,000 tokens of GPT-5.6 Sol today and I haven't started work yet.
- DenisM 3mo ago
  Where did the tokens go?
  - simonw 3mo ago
    I ran a couple of prompts to reverse-engineer my ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/*/sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4" file - Codex figured out how to lz4 decompress the file, then I had it interpret some base64 encoded binary data in the JSON, that session is here: https://gisthost.github.io/?986cb066dd8502cf0200a5cc6fdeb4c6 https://gisthost.github.io/?986cb066dd8502cf0200a5cc6fdeb4c6
- helloplanets 3mo ago
  With the new Ultracode modes in Claude Code and Codex it's been taken to the next level. I mean, multi agent systems have been available for a long time, but the newest models seem to be much more RL'd for them. Both GPT-5.6 and Fable will happily run 3+ hours straight off a relatively simple goal in that mode, burn through millions of tokens in the process. Not saying it's great bang for your buck, but just that those modes are there and being pushed by the companies.
Abh1Works 3mo ago
Something I havent heard alot of people talk about is meat. I dont think you can be against data centers, but also buy cheap meat. I understand food != compute, and thats a fact. BUT the same people who are protesting against AI data centers are the same people who fly every year, eat steak in every other dinner, and generally indulge in activities that are bad for the planet (and theres no acknowledgement).
- cagenut 3mo ago
  and flying. beef and flying are the two most impactful personal choices you can make (nearly everything else has a 'over a decade'/difficult-life-tradeoff factor). beef and flying are easy.
- barbazoo 3mo ago
  > The people that... are the same people that... Just stop. If you fund yourself starting a sentence that way, just close the browser.
- DWe1 3mo ago
  If you make such claims please back this up with evidence? I, for one, would expect a strong correlation between skepticism against AI data centers, vegetarianism and the preference for alternative travel methods to flying. Your comment sounds a lot like whataboutism to me.
  - RetroTechie 3mo ago
    > I, for one, would expect a strong correlation between skepticism against AI data centers, vegetarianism and the preference for alternative travel methods to flying. And then you'd be equally wrong as the commenter you replied to. Without data it's just speculation.
- eddyg 3mo ago
  https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/ https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/
DenisM 3mo ago
Remarkably, it took non-AI workloads 25 years to grow from zero to 3%, and it took AI only ~ 2.5 years to get to 2%. This puts a number to my intuitive feeling that things move an order of magnitude faster this time.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
"A final point that’s worth keeping in mind is that the figures we’ve looked at measure electricity consumption, not carbon emissions." Amazon will not publish the amount of carbon emissions from their data centers

73 points by surprisetalk 3mo ago

ch4s3 3mo ago

I think its easy to forget how much energy is required to boil a liter of water, and these charts are a great reminder of the mundane things like that which escape our attention.

DenisM 3mo ago

Select quote: * 5% of electricity in the United States is used to power data centers. For AI-focused ones specifically, it’s probably around 2%.* I think it’s massive.

gruez 3mo ago
>I think it’s massive. So what about the other 3%? That's not "massive"? Or it gets a pass because it's not AI? The whole debate over datacenter resource consumption feels like a rorschach test. Either you think the technology is transformative and therefore the resource consumption is justified, or you think it's slop and therefore any resource consumption can't be justified.
- dundarious 3mo ago
  If it was 2% for VOD streaming, and 3% for every other service that is delivered by a networked computer, I would think "wow, streaming is huge". 2% for one thing that most people hardly use at all, versus 3% for everything else on the computer, is still a remarkable statistic. I'm not making any value judgment in order to say that. I also don't think it's particularly conclusive about anything though. It doesn't on its face make me think anything like "it must be stopped", but it's remarkable.
  - sroussey 3mo ago
    > 2% for one thing that most people hardly use at all AI is hardly used at all? Basically every company and consumer in the country is using it, transitively if not directly.
    - dundarious 3mo ago
      Every company is using it? The deli and the laundromat too? Every consumer? Maybe transitively because they use Google or what have you, but most people I know still don't really know what AI is, never mind have a puritan revulsion over using it (some people are quite performative about this on here), but they just don't use it themselves, except transitively on occasion.
      - sroussey 3mo ago
        Everyone using Google. Watching Netflix. Listening to Spotify. Shopping at Amazon or a Shopify store. Or reading almost anything these days. :( Advertising they see. Using a credit card, writing a check. Beam forming wireless signals. It’s everywhere. Not all AI is an LLM.
        dundarious 3mo ago
        Was the 2% figure counting all those things? I don't think so. This is changing the grounds of the discussion. Ridiculously so. Do you take me for some zealot who hates tensors or matrices or something? I don't even hate LLMs, though I have huge issues with how data has been gathered. I feel like this discussion is useless.
        sroussey 3mo ago
        Look at Meta’s capital budget and tell me people aren’t using AI. People use Facebook, Instagram, etc. I’d say the same for Google, but with Google Cloud it’s hard to know where the dollars are going and for whom. Who exactly is the 2% figure? Can’t all be HN people on side projects using Claude code.
  - gruez 3mo ago
    >that most people hardly use at all Speak for yourself. For "most people", "streaming" is basically TV for them, and the average american watches 2.6 hours per day[1]. It's probably safe to say that at least half of that is "streaming" of some sort, even more if you include other types of "streaming" like music streaming. Moreover nowadays even if they're not plopped in front of a TV, they're watching short form videos. [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm
    - dundarious 3mo ago
      I was referring to AI in that statement, I wrote it somewhat poorly.
      - gruez 3mo ago
        The "hardly use" comparison quickly runs into issues, though. If I use AI and it completes a job that would have taken an hour in 1 minute, should that be counted as a factor against AI, because I'm "hardly" using it (1 minute) compared to the alternative (1 hour)?
        dundarious 3mo ago
        It was written in a specific context: > [AI] that most people hardly use at all and while ambiguous, I meant that quantifying the number of people that use it, results in a not large number. I've had discussions in other threads about how to talk about transitive use, etc., so as with everything at all times, there are certainly ways to skin the cat that justify or invalidate the statement. One has to rely upon good judgment to decide which way is best, and reasonable people may disagree.
- DenisM 3mo ago
  > So what about the other 3%? That's not "massive"? Or it gets a pass because it's not AI? How did you read that in my comment?
- everdrive 3mo ago
  By all means, cull them all. I'm sure the remaining 3% support (in one way or another) terrible web apps that use 150 MB of javascript and data brokers.
eddyg 3mo ago
What's massive is the amount of water used for a handful of almonds. Not daily AI use. https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/ https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/

lopis 3mo ago

The author claims it's surprising that AI uses less electricity than the rest of data centers. Why?? Data centers do a million different things other than AI

StrauXX 3mo ago
AI hardware is much, much more powerhungry than traditional processors though. I can understand their reasoning.
- lopis 3mo ago
  Sure, but it's still surprising that 1/3 of all data centers in the whole world are dedicated to that one use.
Aurornis 3mo ago
It's surprising because that's all anyone hears about right now. Many are surprised to learn that data centers use much less water than golf courses or pools. We hear about it so much in the news it sounds like it's the overwhelming largest consumption problem around.
- axus 3mo ago
  If they use so little water and power, why aren't they being built in the empty office buildings? Seems like commercial real estate was made for ... commercial activity.
  - rick_dalton 3mo ago
    This makes no sense? How is one even correlated with the other? Data centers obviously have much different requirements than office buildings for people. On a very small scale this works but not on a larger scale.
  - fxwin 3mo ago
    Nobody is saying that they use "so little water and power", just that the average person has no clue about the orders of magnitude at which anything outside of a private household uses these things, including things they previously didn't really have a problem with (like golf courses or almond farms) Most people just hear <gigantic number of m³ or kWh> and their brain goes "damn, that must be a lot, i don't use nearly that much at home"

xnx 3mo ago

Our World in Data is great, but this article would've been improved if it offered a chart that offered a comparison to it's leading "1.5% of global electricity number". For example: 7% to 10% of all global electricity is consumed by air conditioning. It's not hard to think of relatively small interventions that could save 1.5% of global energy use annually.

ggreer 3mo ago
Increasing global electricity production by 1.5% (or 500 terawatt-hours) would also be a solution. Production from solar power increased by 600TWh from 2024-2025 and its rate of adoption is increasing as costs go down, so this doesn't seem like a problem worth worrying about.
- paulhebert 3mo ago
  The problem is we need to be reducing our use of highly polluting energy sources and shifting to renewable sources. The more our energy use increases the harder it is to do so.
- RetroTechie 3mo ago
  Going by those figures, would mean that AI datacenters built so far, consume enough energy to undo almost a year of solar power buildout. AND growing like crazy. That's running costs. Not energy going into a building's construction or fabrication of the gear going in there. Does seem like a problem worth worrying about.
  - yellowapple 3mo ago
    The obvious solution here is for datacenter buildouts to include the power generation necessary for them to operate. Here in Nevada that's exactly what quite a few of the larger datacenter companies (Switch, Google, Apple, etc.) have been doing, whether by outright building solar farms themselves or by signing PPAs with geothermal companies like Ormat. That's indeed how these companies are able to advertise their datacenters as powered by “100% renewables” despite NV Energy's grid power mix including non-renewables (namely natural gas).

shipman05 3mo ago

I'm dismayed by the current political discourse on this topic. Seems like the two camps are 1) let mega corps build data centers with impunity or 2) use NIMBY tactics to oppose them in all cases. I want to see a pro-growth approach that makes the mega corps assume the costs of their negative externalities. I want to see an increased build out of renewable and nuclear energy sources. I want to see environmental protections in place to limit impacts on aquifers and other water sources. Democracies don't handle nuance well.

jjulius 3mo ago
>Democracies don't handle nuance well. Especially when modern discourse revolves around 140-character hot takes.
- bakies 3mo ago
  And Instagram reels. Mine is so full of anti-green-energy propaganda I uninstalled the app.
  - penr0se 3mo ago
    Instagram's algorithm is based on what you interact the most with (even stopping to watch the reel, to read comments or to write one counts as interacting). You can start marking all that content as "Not interesting" and in the worst case just blocking those profiles to fix your feed and algorithm (or even go to your settings and tweak your interests directly). But uninstalling the app is never a bad choice regardless
    - bakies 3mo ago
      Yeah I started blocking and gave up
    - no-name-here 3mo ago
      One more option - you can also reset your algorithm in the IG settings.

lordnacho 3mo ago

I presume running an electric shower includes heating up the water? Otherwise I don't understand how it could be so energy intensive. The energy is the mgh of the water lifted, plus the heat you put into it. Heat tends to be by far bigger in that calculation unless I've missed something.

shipman05 3mo ago
Yes. They're likely referring to on-demand electric heating units that are installed near the shower head. Our World in Data is based in the UK. Electric showers like this one https://www.mirashowers.co.uk/p/showers/shop-electric-showers https://www.mirashowers.co.uk/p/showers/shop-electric-shower... are more common there than they are in the US.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]

chrisgd 3mo ago

We all just look at energy as a price. I think more people are concerned if our prices will go up, not how much energy it uses. The bigger question is water. How much water do they use? Is it potable to begin with? Is it usable after? Will they drive prices up. These are one time builds with minimal jobs created after for a tech that could end my career. If I lose my job, I don’t also want to have no water and higher bills.

ggreer 3mo ago
The talk about AI water usage exists because in Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, she got water usage wrong by three orders of magnitude.[1] For data centers that use water cooling, it's almost always non-potable water, and it's usually returned to the body of water it was pumped out of (though slightly warmer). If you're worried about water consumption, things like golf courses and farm subsidies for water-intensive crops are much bigger issues. 1. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...

simonw 3mo ago

> For longer queries or requests that rely on AI agents or reasoning, the footprint is higher. Epoch AI estimated that a long query (7,500 words of input) could consume about 2.5 Wh, and a very long one (75,000 words) could consume 40 Wh. Those are far higher than the simple text query. One thing that's missing from almost all of these energy estimates is the impact of "agentic" queries, which were rare a year ago and increasingly common today. I've asked questions of GPT-5.6 Pro that take 19 minutes to return an answer, as the model runs hundreds of search and site navigation tool calls (and a bit of executed Python code too) trying to get to a credible answer. I'm confident that 19 minutes involves a lot more than 75,000 words worth of tokens. With coding agents we can at least get an accurate token count. I'm already at 204,000 tokens of GPT-5.6 Sol today and I haven't started work yet.

DenisM 3mo ago
Where did the tokens go?
- simonw 3mo ago
  I ran a couple of prompts to reverse-engineer my ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/*/sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4" file - Codex figured out how to lz4 decompress the file, then I had it interpret some base64 encoded binary data in the JSON, that session is here: https://gisthost.github.io/?986cb066dd8502cf0200a5cc6fdeb4c6 https://gisthost.github.io/?986cb066dd8502cf0200a5cc6fdeb4c6
helloplanets 3mo ago
With the new Ultracode modes in Claude Code and Codex it's been taken to the next level. I mean, multi agent systems have been available for a long time, but the newest models seem to be much more RL'd for them. Both GPT-5.6 and Fable will happily run 3+ hours straight off a relatively simple goal in that mode, burn through millions of tokens in the process. Not saying it's great bang for your buck, but just that those modes are there and being pushed by the companies.

Abh1Works 3mo ago

Something I havent heard alot of people talk about is meat. I dont think you can be against data centers, but also buy cheap meat. I understand food != compute, and thats a fact. BUT the same people who are protesting against AI data centers are the same people who fly every year, eat steak in every other dinner, and generally indulge in activities that are bad for the planet (and theres no acknowledgement).

cagenut 3mo ago
and flying. beef and flying are the two most impactful personal choices you can make (nearly everything else has a 'over a decade'/difficult-life-tradeoff factor). beef and flying are easy.
barbazoo 3mo ago
> The people that... are the same people that... Just stop. If you fund yourself starting a sentence that way, just close the browser.
DWe1 3mo ago
If you make such claims please back this up with evidence? I, for one, would expect a strong correlation between skepticism against AI data centers, vegetarianism and the preference for alternative travel methods to flying. Your comment sounds a lot like whataboutism to me.
- RetroTechie 3mo ago
  > I, for one, would expect a strong correlation between skepticism against AI data centers, vegetarianism and the preference for alternative travel methods to flying. And then you'd be equally wrong as the commenter you replied to. Without data it's just speculation.
eddyg 3mo ago
https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/ https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/

DenisM 3mo ago

Remarkably, it took non-AI workloads 25 years to grow from zero to 3%, and it took AI only ~ 2.5 years to get to 2%. This puts a number to my intuitive feeling that things move an order of magnitude faster this time.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago

"A final point that’s worth keeping in mind is that the figures we’ve looked at measure electricity consumption, not carbon emissions." Amazon will not publish the amount of carbon emissions from their data centers