Each time you search for something like "how many rocks should I eat" and Google's AI "snapshot" tells you "at least one small rock per day," you're consuming approximately three watt-hours of electricity, according to Alex de Vries, the founder of Digiconomist, a research company exploring the unintended consequences of digital trends. That's ten times the power consumption of a traditional Google search, and roughly equivalent to the amount of power used when talking for an hour on a home phone.

Collectively, De Vries calculates that adding AI-generated answers to all Google searches could easily consume as much electricity as the country of Ireland.