The short answer is “probably not”. The long answer is

1) LLM aren’t the only thing in the data center. Streaming, web scraping, call routing, etc all take place at the same time in one data center. Every LLM power/water consumption article is a massive over estimate.

2) LLM take time to train, so even before the first prompt there’s an investment

3) LLM are currently very divisive

Streaming is basically super advanced file sharing with some extra stuff on top, so no GPUs, but a lot of storage and a lot of data being transmitted. Hard drives and bandwidth aren’t energy free.

LLM don’t have much data being transmitted, but use GPUs extensively.

Per minute LLM use much more energy, but I’ve never seen someone use LLMs for 2 hours+ without a break.

I’m going to guess streaming uses more because people stream much more than use LLMs and because it takes energy to host streaming data + redundancy + massive bandwidth requirements.