Red flag or red herring? Here's how AI’s power, water and carbon footprints stack up on a global scale

Part one of our Keep Calm and Count the Kilowatts series showed how AI prompts are only a small portion of a person's daily power use. But with OpenAI alone now handling over 2.5 billion prompts a day from hundreds of millions of active users, how does the power use look on a global scale?

The big picture

Looking at the total context is where doom and gloom articles often miss explaining how AI fits into global resource use. So for an easy comparison, I’ve collected together the annual power use for a range of relevant and interesting uses and categories.

It’s pretty clear that AI is a tiny fraction of overall electricity use on a personal or global level and it’s beaten by tech as unassuming as Wi-Fi. That doesn't mean it's not still a huge amount of power ...