AI Agents Are Thirsty for Power
Silicon Valley is shifting away from chatbot queries toward a future filled with resource-intensive agentic AI—and it's driving the data center buildout.
Welcome back to Power Play ! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. If you’ve got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76.
“What on earth are they building all of these data centers for? ” an exasperated friend asked me recently.
They’re not the only one asking: We got several similar questions on our recent data center livestream . It’s a really reasonable thing to wonder about. After all, if AI is already making all these breakthroughs, why are tech companies taking on billions of dollars of debt and constructing some of the biggest power plants in the world to build even more data centers?
The answer isn’t to help the average user search for recipes or look up places to visit on a vacation; simple chatbot queries are an increasingly outdated way of thinking about how AI works. Now, AI is all about agents—there’s no official definition, but roughly speaking, agents are large language model-based systems designed to make autonomous decisions to execute a task—and the shift towards them is part of what’s driving Silicon Valley’s power buildout.
Agents are now at the heart of the frontier labs’ work on AI. They’re doing some astounding—and terrifying—things. Recently, OpenAI announced that a swarm of more than 10,000 agents sending 2.7 million messages had solved a longstanding math problem. (Mathematicians pushed back on the company’s claims.) While this is an outlier—AI labs are highly committed to solving supposedly unsolvable problems, and willing to throw unusual amounts of resources into doing so—all those messages burned through a lot of processing power. That equates to a lot of energy: probably tens of millions of dollars’ worth, Max tells me, though how much exactly is tough to say.
Private AI companies have historically been choosy about what to disclose when it comes to environmental metrics around their products. Many CEOs often point to single queries made by individuals as a measure of resource use. In a recent podcast interview , OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that the water use needed to harvest a single almond amounted to 38,000 ChatGPT queries. (The calculation has been disputed .)
