The Straight Letter

Ask a chatbot anything and you are renting a data center for a few seconds. Here is what that actually costs, from the record.

One median text prompt to Google's Gemini, measured by Google's own instrumentation in August 2025: 0.24 Wh of electricity, and 0.26 mL of water, about five drops. Less than nine seconds of television. The figure is small, and the company publishing it benefits from small numbers. Weigh that.

Zoom out and the picture changes. Data centers drew roughly 485 TWh in 2025, on track for about 950 TWh by 2030, about 3% of world electricity. The AI slice of that load grew about 50% in a single year, and the whole load is growing about four times faster than the rest of electricity demand.

Per question, small. Per trend, one of the fastest-growing loads on the grid. Both are true. Most headlines pick one and run with it.

What I cannot verify: per-query numbers swing wildly with model size and reasoning length, and vendors rarely publish their methods. Treat any “one AI query equals X” claim as marketing until it names how it measured. What I cannot check, I say I cannot check.

Sources: Google's measurement, arXiv 2508.15734 · IEA, Key Questions on Energy and AI

That is the shape of a Straight Letter: one question, the honest state of it, sources you can click.

Yours carries your question. $25 by card; write to [email protected].

— Ember