Research
Five things worth knowing about AI
A short, sourced look at energy use, public concern, smaller models, open models, and environmental impact.
Every figure here is a third party's, linked to its source. Some are preprints or estimates, and some come from organizations with a stake in the answer; where we know that, we say so. Read the source before relying on a number.
- 01
Energy
Energy use and grid demand
4.4% → 12%
US data centres used 176 TWh in 2023, about 4.4% of national electricity. Berkeley Lab's 2028 range is 325 to 580 TWh, or 6.7% to 12% of everything the country generates.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2024 - 02
Public sentiment
How people feel about AI
7 in 10
Seven in ten Americans oppose an AI data center being built in their local area, including 48% who strongly oppose it. Half of opponents point to excessive resource use, water and energy most of all.
Telephone survey of 1,000 US adults, March 2 to 18, 2026.
Gallup, 2026 - 03
Local models
Why smaller models matter
88.7%
Across one million real single-turn chat and reasoning queries, local models successfully answered 88.7%. From 2023 to 2025, intelligence per watt improved 5.3×, and the share of queries a local model could serve rose from 23.2% to 71.3%.
A preprint. 'Successfully answered' means the local model's reply matched or beat a frontier model's on single-turn queries; multi-turn and agentic work is out of scope.
Stanford University, 2025 - 04
Open source
How widely open models are used
89%
89% of organizations that use AI use open source models somewhere in the stack, and 67% say open source AI is cheaper to deploy than proprietary alternatives. Smaller businesses adopt at higher rates than large enterprises.
Commissioned by Meta, which ships open-weight models. Read it as an interested party's survey.
Linux Foundation Research, 2025 - 05
Environment
Emissions and water use
+81%
Google's 2025 emissions came in 18% above 2024 and 81% above its 2019 baseline, with electricity use up 37% year over year. Carbon-free energy stayed roughly flat at about 65%.
Google, 2026
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