AI agents use roughly 600 times more energy than a simple chat prompt

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Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather tracked his Claude Code usage over eight weeks: 3.2 billion tokens and about 170 kWh of data center electricity.

Per prompt, that's roughly 600 times more than a typical AI chat.

His data shows how much the low figures reported by Google and OpenAI distort the reality of agent-based AI.

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