Answer: C – More than ten times as much

More complex AI tasks can require dramatically more energy than a simple chatbot query because the model has to keep working through multiple steps rather than producing a quick response. Microsoft researchers found that while an optimised AI query can use around 0.31 watt-hours, longer reasoning and agentic tasks can consume more than ten times that amount. That helps explain why the move from chatbots to AI agents could create such a huge new appetite for compute — and for the chips, data centres and electricity supplying it.