Well, partly because they (all but X, IIRC) have commitments to shift to carbon-neutral energy.
But also, from the article:
> ChatGPT is now estimated to be the fifth-most visited website in the world
That's ChatGPT today. They're looking ahead to 100x-ing (or 1,000,000x-ing) the usage as AI replaces more and more existing work.
I can run Llama 3 on my laptop, and we can measure the energy usage of my laptop--it maxes out at around 0.1 toasters. o3 is presumably a bit more energy intensive, but the reason it's using a lot of power is the >100MM daily users, not that a single user uses a lot of energy for a simple chat.