What AI really costs to run. I’ve had a question stuck in my head lately: how much energy does it actually take to use an AI chatbot? With so much attention on the environmental impact of AI data centers, I wanted to understand what that means on an individual level. I assumed there’d be a simple answer — but the deeper I went, the blurrier things became. So I talked to researchers, dug through the data, and tried to make sense of what all our prompting really adds up to. And along the way, I stumbled into a much bigger story — one that’s less about any single query, and more about the world being built to power them all.