“Google says it has calculated the energy required for its Gemini AI service: Sending a single text prompt consumes as much energy as watching television for nine seconds.”

That’s pretty staggering when you consider that it’s no longer possible to do a Google search without generating an AI summary. Google processes something like 8 billion searches per day, so if each one of those triggers a prompt equivalent to watching 9 seconds of television, every day the total power cost is equivalent to about 2200 years of TV watching. Per day. And that’s just search, for just one tech company.