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In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
(www.technologyreview.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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Cool, now how much power was consumed before even a single prompt was ran in training that model, and how much power is consumed on an ongoing basis adding new data to those AI models even without user prompts. Also how much power was consumed with each query before AI was shoved down our throats, and how many prompts does an average user make per day?
I did some quick math with metas llama model and the training cost was about a flight to Europe worth of energy, not a lot when you take in the amount of people that use it compared to the flight.
Whatever you're imagining as the impact, it's probably a lot less. AI is much closer to video games then things that are actually a problem for the environment like cars, planes, deep sea fishing, mining, etc. The impact is virtually zero if we had a proper grid based on renewable.
Please show your math.
One Nvidia H100 DGX AI server consumes 10.2kW at 100% utilization, meaning that one hour’s use of one server is equivalent to the electricity consumption of the average USA home in one year. This is just a single 8-GPU server; it excludes the electricity required by the networking and storage hardware elsewhere in the data center, let alone the electricity required to run the facility’s climate control.
xAI alone has deployed hundreds of thousands of H100 or newer GPUs. Let’s SWAG 160K GPUs = ~20K DGX servers = >200MW for compute alone.
H100 is old. State of the art GB200 NVL72 is 120kW per rack.
Musk is targeting not 160K, but literally one million GPUs deployed by the end of this year. He has built multiple new natural gas power plants which he is now operating without any environmental permits or controls, to the detriment of the locals in Memphis.
This is just one company training one typical frontier model. There are many competitors operating at similar scale and sadly the vast majority of their new capacity is running on hydrocarbons because that’s what they can deploy at the scale they need today.
If their energy consumption actually was so small, why are they seeking to use nuclear reactors to power data centres now?
Because demand for data centers is rising, with AI as just one of many reasons.
But that's not as flashy as telling people it takes the energy of a small country to make a picture of a cat.
Also interesting that we're ignoring something here -- big tech is chasing cheap sources of clean energy. Don't we want cheap, clean energy?
AI is the driver of the parabolic spike in global data center buildouts. No other use case comes close in terms of driving new YoY growth in tech infra capex spend.
Sure we do. Do we want the big tech corporations to hold the reins of that though?
If cheap(er/better) energy is invented then that's good, why would tech corpos be able to "hold the reins" of it exclusively?
Well, patents and what have you are a thing. I’m mostly thinking that I wouldn’t want e.g. Facebook to run any nuclear reactors or energy grids. That’s something I prefer the government does.
Nuclear reactors already exist, that's not new tech.
I’m not saying it is. I’m saying that predatory companies shouldn’t run critical infrastructure.
Didn’t xitter just install a gas powered data center that’s breaking EPA rules for emissions?
Yes, yes it did. And as far as I can tell, it's still belching it out, just so magats can keep getting owned by it. What a world
https://tennesseelookout.com/2025/07/07/a-billionaire-an-ai-supercomputer-toxic-emissions-and-a-memphis-community-that-did-nothing-wrong/
To be fair, nuclear power is cool as fuck and would reduce the carbon footprint of all sorts of bullshit.
Volume of requests and power consumption requirements unrelated to requests made, at least I have to assume. Certainly doesn't help that google has forced me to make a request to their ai every time I run a standard search.
Seriously. I'd be somewhat less concerned about the impact if it was only voluntarily used. Instead, AI is compulsively shoved in every nook and cranny of digital product simply to justify its own existence.
The power requirement for training is ongoing, since mere days after Sam Altman released a very underehelming GPT-5, he begins hyping up the next one.
I also never saw a calculation that took into amount my VPS costs. The fckers scrape half the internet, warming up every server in the world connected to the internet. How much energy is that?
I'd like to understand what this math was before accepting this as fact.
I usually liken it to video games, ya. Is it worse that nothing? Sure, but that flight or road trip, etc, is a bigger concern. Not to mention even before AI we've had industrial usage of energy and water usage that isn't sustainable... almonds in CA alone are a bigger problem than AI, for instance.
Not that I'm pro-AI cause it's a huge headache from so many other perspectives, but the environmental argument isn't enough. Corpo greed is probably the biggest argument against it, imo.