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Discussion (21 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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.
Or are those just the two ends of the spectrum? I don't know anyone on either extreme of the spectrum.
Especially when modern discourse revolves around 140-character hot takes.
I think it does the discourse a disservice to take these two as equal.
[0]I've seen people whinging about building solar plants in the desert, windmills off shore, data centers in silicon valley...
* 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.
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.
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.
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
AI is hardly used at all? Basically every company and consumer in the country is using it, transitively if not directly.
How did you read that in my comment?
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.
Most people just hear <gigantic number of mÂł or kWh> and their brain goes "damn, that must be a lot, i don't use nearly that much at home"
AI focused data centres also could, but require a higher amount of power and cooling per rack, so it's less practical. The point is not that they don't use more than a typical office, but that they don't use the world-ending amounts people assume they use.
The operators should still be made to pay for the externalities, and regulated to ensure they don't make life miserable for people around them.
But that doesn't mean we need to stop building them.
Water is too expensive and wasteful to just run through pipes and send out to the ocean just for cooling. Power though… the reason bank buildings are loved for data centers is that they are on two power lines so if one goes out the other is available.
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.
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-mislead...
Our World in Data is based in the UK. Electric showers like this one https://www.mirashowers.co.uk/p/showers/shop-electric-shower... are more common there than they are in the US.
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.
The more our energy use increases the harder it is to do so.