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?

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.

That's not small....

100's of Gigawatts is how much energy that is. Fuel is pretty damn energy dense.

A Boeing 777 might burn 45k Kg of fuel, at a density of 47Mj/kg. Which comes out to... 600 Megawatts

Or about 60 houses energy usage for a year in the U.S.

It's an asinine way to measure it to be fair, not only is it incredibly ambiguous, but almost no one has any reference as to how much energy that actually is.