Well, first, Deloitte says data centers as a whole only account for 2% of global energy use.

This means that while yes, artificial intelligence is hogging an increasing portion of system resources and compute globally: it is still only a very, very small fraction of the energy usage of humanity as a whole or even the tech industry alone.

According to your own source’s numbers, AI’s share of data-center electricity usage is roughly 82 terawatt (also your Wired article’s author misspells terawatt as terrawatt the entire time, maybe it is a spelling I’ve just never seen?) hours, roughly similar to the annual electricity consumption of Switzerland. Sounds bad, right?

Well, yes, but actually, no.

Global energy consumption this year is around 34,000 TWh. That means that if data centers represented 2% of global energy use, data centers this year used around ~500-700 TWh total. (34,000 * 0.02 == 680)

That means that, again, using Wired’s own value of 82 TWh, AI alone represents only around 12% of global data center energy usage. Keep in mind that is not 12% of global energy usage, it is 12% of the global 2% energy usage data centers are collectively responsible for, meaning AI is responsible for a fucking staggering ~0.24% of global energy use.

What is the other 88%, of data center energy usage, you might ask? A bunch of corpo bullshit, including, namely; infrastructure for social media, streaming, and all this other shitass tech everyone readily accepted with no qualms until the spooky “AI” boogeyman made people wake up about the wider environmental impacts of big tech.

Except, not really though. Because as we see, most people are like you, and have a weird laser-focused obsession with the energy usage of AI in particular. You are doing a disservice to environmentalism by being intentionally ignorant of the wider implications of these statistics and their context. Don’t believe every sensationalized fucking Wired article you find after doing a Google search, friend.