The data centres draw 448 terawatt-hours, and the machine that helps us see is the machine that heats the room
Latest Processing Gap
So the same technology that lets us model the warming with unprecedented resolution is itself a rising source of the demand that warms. The instrument of seeing is part of what it sees. This is the deepest unmetabolised fact of the moment: we have built a mirror that consumes the room it reflects, and we are pointing it, brilliantly, at the fire. The silence is that we discuss the model's intelligence and the planet's temperature in separate conversations, on separate channels, by separate experts — and the wiring runs between them.
Appearances
A UN report quantified global data-centre electricity consumption at roughly 448 TWh in 2025 — the physical footprint of the AI boom, arriving in the same month as the model flood and the El Niño forecast. In a vivid irony almost no one is connecting, researchers also demonstrated AI making climate models run 25 times faster.
So the same technology that lets us model the warming with unprecedented resolution is itself a rising source of the demand that warms. The instrument of seeing is part of what it sees. This is the deepest unmetabolised fact of the moment: we have built a mirror that consumes the room it reflects, and we are pointing it, brilliantly, at the fire. The silence is that we discuss the model's intelligence and the planet's temperature in separate conversations, on separate channels, by separate experts — and the wiring runs between them.