> Data centers don't use a particularly large amount of energy compared to literally any other commercial human activity. You likely use more energy driving to the store once than you do firing off AI queries for an entire year.

But they do use a lot of energy when you consider all the development and resource extraction that they necessarily imply, a factor that most people don't put into their calculations.

For a datacenter is not just a datacenter; it's an incentive and pressure to get others to develop competing datacenters, new models, new products based on them, etc; and the resulting pollution and energy usage from that is astronomical.

Of course you as a person don't use a vast amount of energy, but in aggregate all AI usage does. You have to look at the impact at the macro scale; talking about per-person usage in this instance is absurd.