So, more than a %?
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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Last I read, the entire internet used less than 2% of the electricity we generate. Using the same amount of energy just for a spicy autocorrect is insane.
This is 12 years old
I wonder what percent of people use AI. Because I think it would show just how crazy high that power usage is.
Hm, isn't the problem that a strained energy grid suddenly adds a lot of demand, also makes the prices skyrocket for ordinary poor people ? Its like they switch focus away from something.
Also, using global electricity statistics that includes Chinas gigantic energy budget, for a Western problem as the one above, seems biased af. The whole article smells a bit like paid content - propaganda - to me.
It is pretty insane to use 2% of global energy for that piece of shit technology, almost exclusive developed only to give more billions to billionaires and nothing else, at a time when we desperately need to minimise energy consumption.
Less than 2% is somewhat a shitty framing.
I would say: "More than 1%!"
Yeah that's an insane amount. Nearly 1 in every 50 joules generated is currently going to generative AI. That's incredible for a single purpose.
Not entirely true. Those are the numbers for all data centers, regardless if AI was used. This includes email, streaming services, and nearly everything you do on the internet. As per the linked article, the estimate for specifically AI use is closer to 0.5% or 1 of every 200 joules
I estimate that AI consumed around 0.5% of the world’s electricity in 2025.
So a QUARTER of ALL power used by ALL data centres is for fucking AI! That's still crazy.
Especially when it's the majority of all data center buildout (if these companies had their way, the amount would be higher), the GPUs inside them presently can't be repurposed if demand doesn't catch up (or if they just depreciate), and nobody knows how to make these profitable
More than a quarter.
So using a more distributed Internet (instead of sticking all out services in data centers) would help balance that.
that's just making more, smaller data centers. The data centers themselves are probably more efficient than an equivalent amount of compute that's spread out elsewhere, just because the cooling systems for data centers generally benefit from being huge.
The problem is that we keep building more data centers for stupid shit.