Cartoon panorama: a robot and a maker in a hot-air balloon look down a winding mountain road that climbs from a single glowing square marked 0.3 Wh in the valley, past a house, a highway, and a city, to a glowing grid on the horizon.

THE ZOOM JOURNEY

Electricity, from one question to the whole grid — five leaps, almost no reading. Amber is always the AI. Gray is always ordinary life.

0.3 watt-hours

One question to an AI. Same as one Google search.

This is the whole thing. Everything below is just this square, multiplied.

zoom out ×50
15 watt-hours

Charging your phone tonight.

Your question is one square of the charge. An hour of gaming is 27 of these whole grids.

zoom out ×200
3 kilowatt-hours

One load in the dryer. Or one hot shower — same thing.

At this scale your question can't be drawn. A whole year of daily AI chat is the amber patch — about a third of the load.

Cartoon: a dryer erupts a huge green cloud of squares while a tiny jar on a shelf holds a whole year of AI, which the robot polishes proudly.
PAID ONCE
50 gigawatt-hours

Building the model (GPT-4, the biggest well-known bill). Like a factory: one big cost, then it just answers.

→

Spread over the ~700,000,000,000 answers it gives, the factory adds less than the answer itself. And it's shrinking: 2024's DeepSeek-V3 hit the frontier for 4% of this.

Cartoon: a colossal cake labeled TRAINING RUN is sliced into billions of paper-thin slices stretching over the horizon; the maker checks the math on a chalkboard.
zoom out ×33,000,000,000 — the big one
~100 terawatt-hours / year

All AI data centers on Earth. Three Irelands. Half of bitcoin.

all AI ~100 U.S. grid 4,300 this whole panel = world electricity, 31,000 TWh

The panel is the world's yearly electricity. AI is the amber chip — about 0.3% — and it's the block that's growing. Honest people can worry about the growth and still keep the chip this size in mind.

Cartoon: the robot and the maker roast marshmallows at a hilltop campfire at night; a small amber square and a big gray block lean against each other like old friends, a distant city grid glowing below.

One question is almost nothing.
A million data centers are almost a country.
Both are true. Now you've seen both.

Want the actual numbers? → the chart version