Also, there's much, much more going on in data centers than AI, so data center growth isn't necessarily AI growth.
Given that most people have smart televisions which gather and send information for, among other things, selling to advertisers, I can't help but wonder if their calculation is just for the TV or if it includes the data center overhead - which may well be running an AI model.
You wrote: 'My hunch going in was that a lot of this is waste: dozens of companies racing to build the same thing in secret, each burning energy so that one of them can win.'
Part of that waste is all the data scrapers draw power (from botnets running on residential proxies with less efficiency than a data center) -- and the scraped data isn't shared. The scrapers cause more demand on the servers, which need more power. The server operators deploy anti-bot protections like proof-of-work, which requires more power, and the anti-anti-bot methods which use real hardware or automated full browsers which again require more power.
Any idea what that power use might be?
BTW, you did a bit of a cheat there, with "The oldest big AI workload isn’t chat at all." If recommendation systems (or Bayesian spam filtering) count as AI then we've long known that AI for everyone is easily possible, with well less than a tenth of a kettle of tea per person per day.
If you're serious about including recommendation systems, you'll need to include the advertisement infrastructure as part of the AI overhead, as all use recommendation methods to figure out how much to bid for an advertisement on your screen. Or probably LLMs these days.
How much power is going into powering online advertisement?
First, the numbers I quoted were only for data centers: "The CFI identified around 140 (50 GW) data centres, the majority of which are likely to receive a Gate 2 offer. 71 (around 20 GW) data centres reported they have achieved financial commitment with FID."
That's 50 GW potential demand, of which I quoted only the 20 GW with financial commitment, to be conservative. That in a country where current peak demand was 45 GW, which is how I got the 50% number.
Second, the report says that the data center growth is primarily for AI: "The significant growth in data centres, driven by investment in artificial intelligence and the expectations for its economic and social potential, is a global challenge."
(What large amount of non-AI data center growth do you know about?)
Third, it highlights that while there will be other demands, these lag behind the more immediate demand for data center power:
"Data centres must be central to any solutions we implement. Data centre growth has brought into sharp focus the challenges within the demand connections process. However wider electrification of the economy and the associated rise in electricity demand, would, over time, have exposed these challenges. This would have made demand connections reform unavoidable."
There is no way to get from those numbers to conclude the AI power use per capita per diem is "a tenth of a kettle of tea."