I think its easy to forget how much energy is required to boil a liter of water, and these charts are a great reminder of the mundane things like that which escape our attention.

Select quote:

* 5% of electricity in the United States is used to power data centers. For AI-focused ones specifically, it’s probably around 2%.*

I think it’s massive.

The author claims it's surprising that AI uses less electricity than the rest of data centers. Why?? Data centers do a million different things other than AI

Our World in Data is great, but this article would've been improved if it offered a chart that offered a comparison to it's leading "1.5% of global electricity number".

For example: 7% to 10% of all global electricity is consumed by air conditioning. It's not hard to think of relatively small interventions that could save 1.5% of global energy use annually.