See this is part of the problem, people aren’t paying attention to the words and spin that is being used to deceive you.

It’s not 5% of enegy use, the statistics you see for that number are for “electricity use” which is not the same.

Electricity production/consumption only accounts for around 35% of global energy use (and not all of it comes from fossil fuels). Most global energy use is fossil fuels being burned directly in vehicles or industrial processes.

The US also hosts a very large percentage of the world’s datacenters. That 5% number also includes All types of datacenters, not just AI which still make up a large portion of that number.

So when you actually complete the math, the current AI enegy use is around 0.5% of global energy use.

For comparison, meat production takes around 15% of global energy use.

Feel free to double check the facts and math on this, it’s all available publicly.