The "Green AI" Crisis & Sustainable Infrastructure

AI got far more efficient per query while its total footprint hit records. Google measured a 33x drop in energy per prompt, down to 0.24 Wh for a median text prompt, then reported an 18% rise in emissions and a 34% rise in water use. Both are true, because "energy per prompt" is the wrong unit: it is a text-only median, it says nothing about volume, and it mostly misses the hardware manufacturing behind new data centres. Globally AI is still a small share of electricity, around 0.5%, but it is growing very fast and landing on specific grids and watersheds, which is where the real crisis is. Th