Projections for the AI sector’s energy needs in the coming years are massive in scale. The International Energy Agency expects AI’s energy demand to double between now and 2030, presenting a serious challenge for energy security in many nations and regions where large data center developments are planned.
But planning ahead for data center development and their associated energy needs is an almost impossible task. The real and future energy use of artificial intelligence is incredibly hard to pin down due to the rapid growth and advancement of the technology, as well as the lack of disclosure requirements imposed on AI firms. Accurate projections for the future are therefore all but impossible, since we don’t even know how much energy AI is using in the present moment. But we do know that it’s a whole lot.
The result of all this uncertainty is an enormous amount of hand-wringing on the part of end-users and rapid – panicked, even – investment in new and expanded energy production capacity on the part of the private and public sectors alike. “The energy resources required to power this artificial-intelligence revolution are staggering, and the world’s biggest tech companies have made it a top priority to harness ever more of that energy, aiming to reshape our energy grids in the process,” stated the MIT Technology Review in a May 2025 report.
World leaders are left with little option but to prepare for the most intensive scenarios. Already, countries around the world are fast-tracking new energy development, often at the risk of climate goals. “From the deserts of the United Arab Emirates to the outskirts of Ireland’s capital, the energy demands of AI applications and training running through these centres are driving the surge of investment into fossil fuels,” Financial Times reported in August.
Better and more responsible policy around AI and its supporting industries will necessarily depend on better and more available data about AI’s energy use – but major questions remain unanswered about how much will that use fluctuate as levels of both integration and efficiency increase, and how much does the way that users interact with these platforms influence the energy footprint of large language models.
The subject of how much energy an individual AI query uses is currently a subject of much debate. There is even a question as to whether our politeness with large language models – using extra computing power to say please and thank you to models like ChatGPT – is directly driving up energy usage and costing companies like OpenAI millions. No matter how many times ChatGPT receives the input “thank you” it has to run a fresh “inference”, performing “a full computational pass through the model.” All those individual computations add up, and add up in a big way.
Of course, the concern over a few extra polite words is extremely small potatoes compared to the myriad other, more demanding ways that AI is being used. Nevertheless, a recent op-ed for The Conversation argues that the “persistence of the idea” that all those drops in the ocean add up to an important impact “suggests that many people already sense AI is not as immaterial as it appears.” The article goes on to state that “that instinct is worth taking seriously.”
On the other hand, this mentality is also diverting attention from the real problem of AI’s environmental impact. Individual queries and user-end activity is virtually negligible compared to what’s happening on the producer end of the equation. The spread of AI is not user-driven. Rather, it’s industry-driven, and being indiscriminately integrated across virtually every economic sector there is at a rapid pace, and with serious energy consequences.
“AI’s integration into almost everything from customer service calls to algorithmic “bosses” to warfare is fueling enormous demand,” the Washington Post reported last August. “Despite dramatic efficiency improvements, pouring those gains back into bigger, hungrier models powered by fossil fuels will create the energy monster we imagine.”
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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