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- Hacker News
- "A final point that’s worth keeping in mind is that the figures we’ve looked at measure electricity consumption, not carbon emissions."
Amazon will not publish the amount of carbon emissions from their data centers
- I presume running an electric shower includes heating up the water? Otherwise I don't understand how it could be so energy intensive. The energy is the mgh of the water lifted, plus the heat you put into it. Heat tends to be by far bigger in that calculation unless I've missed something.by lordnacho
- Yes. They're likely referring to on-demand electric heating units that are installed near the shower head.
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.
by shipman05 - We all just look at energy as a price. I think more people are concerned if our prices will go up, not how much energy it uses. The bigger question is water.
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.
by chrisgd - The talk about AI water usage exists because in Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, she got water usage wrong by three orders of magnitude.[1] For data centers that use water cooling, it's almost always non-potable water, and it's usually returned to the body of water it was pumped out of (though slightly warmer).
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...
by ggreer - Remarkably, it took non-AI workloads 25 years to grow from zero to 3%, and it took AI only ~ 2.5 years to get to 2%.
This puts a number to my intuitive feeling that things move an order of magnitude faster this time.
by DenisM - > For longer queries or requests that rely on AI agents or reasoning, the footprint is higher. Epoch AI estimated that a long query (7,500 words of input) could consume about 2.5 Wh, and a very long one (75,000 words) could consume 40 Wh. Those are far higher than the simple text query.
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.
by simonw - Where did the tokens go?by DenisM
- With the new Ultracode modes in Claude Code and Codex it's been taken to the next level. I mean, multi agent systems have been available for a long time, but the newest models seem to be much more RL'd for them.
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.
by helloplanets - Our World in Data is great, but this article would've been improved if it offered a chart that offered a comparison to it's leading "1.5% of global electricity number".
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.
by xnx - Increasing global electricity production by 1.5% (or 500 terawatt-hours) would also be a solution. Production from solar power increased by 600TWh from 2024-2025 and its rate of adoption is increasing as costs go down, so this doesn't seem like a problem worth worrying about.by ggreer
- The author claims it's surprising that AI uses less electricity than the rest of data centers. Why?? Data centers do a million different things other than AIby lopis
- AI hardware is much, much more powerhungry than traditional processors though. I can understand their reasoning.by StrauXX
- It's surprising because that's all anyone hears about right now.
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.
by Aurornis - I think its easy to forget how much energy is required to boil a liter of water, and these charts are a great reminder of the mundane things like that which escape our attention.by ch4s3
- Something I havent heard alot of people talk about is meat. I dont think you can be against data centers, but also buy cheap meat. I understand food != compute, and thats a fact. BUT the same people who are protesting against AI data centers are the same people who fly every year, eat steak in every other dinner, and generally indulge in activities that are bad for the planet (and theres no acknowledgement).by Abh1Works
- If you make such claims please back this up with evidence? I, for one, would expect a strong correlation between skepticism against AI data centers, vegetarianism and the preference for alternative travel methods to flying. Your comment sounds a lot like whataboutism to me.by DWe1
- and flying. beef and flying are the two most impactful personal choices you can make (nearly everything else has a 'over a decade'/difficult-life-tradeoff factor). beef and flying are easy.by cagenut
- > The people that... are the same people that...
Just stop. If you fund yourself starting a sentence that way, just close the browser.
by barbazoo - by eddyg
- Select quote:
* 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.
by DenisM - >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.
by gruez - What's massive is the amount of water used for a handful of almonds. Not daily AI use.by eddyg
- I'm dismayed by the current political discourse on this topic. Seems like the two camps are 1) let mega corps build data centers with impunity or 2) use NIMBY tactics to oppose them in all cases.
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.
by shipman05 - There’s the pro-growth Abundance faction, but they’re captured by special interests, so they’re predictably advocating for supply-side YIMBYism and relaxed regulation, without addressing the political economy that led us to the current situation.
- > Democracies don't handle nuance well.
Failing democracies don't handle nuance well.
- >Democracies don't handle nuance well.
Especially when modern discourse revolves around 140-character hot takes.
by jjulius - > the two camps are
Or are those just the two ends of the spectrum? I don't know anyone on either extreme of the spectrum.
by barbazoo - One of the camps has all the money, hold all the power, and does indeed behave with impunity. The other camp has no power, has no way to affect anything, holds no political relevance, and NIMBY tactics is one of very few ways they can even hope to have at least some tiny chance of a minor change in their favor.
I think it does the discourse a disservice to take these two as equal.
by runarberg - I think the problem is that "make them build responsibly" has the same outcome as "ban altogether" while being more effort on both sides.
It's too much easier and cheaper to drive one town over and bribe a local politician to let you pollute the river with impunity.
Maybe if we had some sort of Environmental Protection Agency or Federal Trade Commission that could enforce more broadly it would be a different story, and every hyperscaler DC could come with a guarantee of boosting clean energy and water reclamation. That would be a cool thing to have.
by glaslong