I get why water use is the sort of nonsense that spreads around mainstream social media, but it baffles me how a whole council of nerds would pass a vote on a policy that includes that line.
No, it's not like email, or a web server. I can run an email server or apache on my rinky dink computer and get hundreds of requests per second.
I can't run chatgpt, that requires a super computer. And of the stuff I can run, like deepseek, I'm getting very few tokens/s. Not requests! Tokens!
Yes, inference has an energy cost that is significantly more than other compute tasks.
As to actual numbers, they're not that hard to crunch, but we have a few good sources that have done so for us.
Simple first-principles estimate: https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg...
Google report: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15734
Altman claim inside a blog post: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity