Sergio-Aragones-style cartoon: under a hand-lettered banner reading THE ELECTRICITY CHART, a crowd panics in front of a giant poster of colored squares while a tiny robot holds up one small blue square labeled 0.3 and a protester waves an AI!? sign, ignoring the clothes dryer beside him erupting a cloud of green squares.

THE ELECTRICITY CHART

…and where AI actually lives on it

Every square below is a fixed amount of electrical energy, drawn in blocks of fifty (10 wide, 5 tall). Each chart’s squares are worth hundreds to thousands of the chart before — the exchange rate is drawn between the charts — and the entire previous chart reappears as the dashed cluster at the top of the next one.

AI shows up on every single chart: as a rounding error at the top of the page (one query) and as a nation-scale load at the bottom (the global fleet). Both facts are true. Most arguments consist of quoting one and ignoring the other.

Format shamelessly borrowed from xkcd’s radiation dose chart · V1 of this chart

HOW TO READ THIS: one block = 50 squares; things smaller than one square are drawn as a partial square. Rows with a yellow wash are AI or data-center loads. Dashed boxes are everything on the previous chart, combined, redrawn at this chart’s scale. The row is the energy it took to make this very chart.
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