Loading slide
Loading contents...
The other cost is physical, and it lands in specific places.
These models run in data centres: buildings full of the specialised chips from the GPU chapter, drawing power continuously and turning nearly all of it into heat. The heat has to go somewhere, which means cooling, which means more power and, in many designs, evaporating water.
Two numbers make the scale concrete, and both come with a date attached, because this is the part of the picture that moves fastest.
In 2024, data centres in the United States used about 183 terawatt-hours of electricity, a little over 4% of the country's total. Estimates published in 2025 put global data centre demand growing 17% in that year alone, with the AI-focused share climbing considerably faster than that. Not all of this is AI. Data centres also hold everything else the internet does: video, storage, email, banking.
The number that says more is local. In 2023, data centres accounted for about 26% of all electricity supplied in the state of Virginia.
That is the honest shape of this. Nationally it is a few percent of the grid. In the places where the buildings actually cluster, it is a quarter of the power, and that concentration is what turns a statistic into a fight over grid capacity, electricity prices, and who pays for new transmission lines.
Water works the same way. The totals are small against national supply, and the per-question figures that circulate should be treated carefully, since they vary enormously by site and cooling design and drop as hardware improves. The real issue is not the global sum. It is that data centres are often built where land and power are cheap, and some of those places are already short of water.
None of this settles anything by itself. Electricity spent is not automatically electricity wasted. The question is always what it bought.
Which is exactly why the previous slides matter here. The same kilowatt runs a protein-structure prediction and a generated article nobody will read to the end. The grid cannot tell the difference. It draws the power either way, and the share going to the second kind is not small.