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An AI agent can use how much more energy than a simple AI query?
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A - About twice as much
90 votes (26.0%)
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B - About five times as much
82 votes (23.7%)
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C - More than ten times as much
126 votes (36.4%)
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D - Roughly the same
48 votes (13.9%)
Total votes: 346
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.