👍 New rule of thumb for AI energy use: One prompt = one second in the microwave

• A simple AI query uses about 0.3 watt-hours of electricity. A microwave at around 1,000 watts uses about 0.28 watt-hours per second. So a simple AI query corresponds to roughly one second in the microwave.
• A hundred AI queries a day equals the electricity an average American uses in just over a minute.
• AI accounts for less than 0.2 percent of the world's total energy use.

New figures for 2025

Hannah Ritchie has compiled data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) on the electricity use of data centres and AI during 2025. AI data centres consumed 155 TWh, which corresponds to about 0.5 percent of the world's electricity. Data centres as a whole, including those that run services such as Netflix, Google Maps, online banking, and messaging apps, consumed about 1.5 percent of the world's electricity. Data centres that are not AI-focused used more than twice as much electricity as AI data centres.

Since electricity is only part of total energy use, data centres account for less than 0.5 percent of final energy, and AI for less than 0.2 percent.

Energy use per query

A medium-sized text query to an AI model uses about 0.05 watt-hours for the graphics processors, which totals around 0.1 watt-hours. A larger text query uses about 0.3 watt-hours for the graphics processors, or up to 0.6 watt-hours in total.

Google has reported 0.24 watt-hours per text query to Gemini. For ChatGPT, the figure 0.34 watt-hours per query has been mentioned. Asking ten simple questions to a chatbot corresponds to about ten seconds in the microwave.

A hundred queries a day produces a footprint of about 30 watt-hours. That equals the electricity an average American uses in just over a minute, or an average European in two and a half minutes.

More complex tasks use more energy

Agent-based AI tools, which can plan and carry out tasks independently, use more energy per task. Such a task can take 15 minutes or more to complete and involves 4 to 6 sequential calls. A user who runs 24 agent-based queries per day consumes about 2.4 kilowatt-hours, equivalent to one cycle of a tumble dryer or driving an electric car five miles.

Geographically concentrated demand

Demand for data centres is not evenly distributed around the world. In the US, 5 percent of electricity is used for data centres, of which about 2 percent goes to AI data centres. In Europe, the figure is 1.6 percent, but in Ireland data centres account for more than 20 percent of electricity consumption. In the state of Virginia in the US, data centres account for more than a quarter of electricity consumption.

Forecasts to 2030

The IEA presents four scenarios for data centre electricity consumption. In the base case, global electricity consumption reaches 945 TWh in 2030. The high and low scenarios fall within about 100 TWh of this figure. The differences between the scenarios are small because much of the build-out is already planned. It takes several years to build a data centre.

In the base case, data centres grow to 3 percent of global electricity consumption by 2030. AI data centres then consume about the same amount as non-AI data centres. The IEA estimates that data centres account for about 9 percent of the growth in global electricity demand over the next five years.

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