Every time you use AI (and you will use it more and more without even knowing it), you are draining our planet’s battery.

An article in Technology Review tries to figure out just how much.

So what might a day’s energy consumption look like for one person with an AI habit?

Let’s say you’re running a marathon as a charity runner and organizing a fundraiser to support your cause. You ask an AI model 15 questions about the best way to fundraise.

Then you make 10 attempts at an image for your flyer before you get one you are happy with, and three attempts at a five-second video to post on Instagram.

You’d use about 2.9 kilowatt-hours of electricity—enough to ride over 100 miles on an e-bike (or around 10 miles in the average electric vehicle) or run the microwave for over three and a half hours.

That’s one person using AI for just a few minutes.
And this is probably an underestimation.

Multiply that out by the number of people using it and you can see that the data centres generating AI used more power last year than the entire country of Thailand!

And the usage and power consumption of AI is projected to rise exponentially in the near future.

Something to think about.

And just to be hypocritical, I decided to go straight to the source and ask AI (Chat GPT) about its estimated power consumption last year:

In 2024, global data center energy consumption is estimated to be around 415 terawatt-hours (TWh), […] this would be enough energy to power approximately 63.8 million typical households for one year.