Electricity Usage

Botched redactions expose Google data centers' water, power use in Nebraska

Google's Nebraska data centers marked their electricity and water consumption figures as trade secrets in annual reports filed with the state's Department of Water, Energy, and Environment. But the redactions could be bypassed by highlighting and copying the blacked-out text, revealing that the Lincoln facility (Agate LLC) used 52.65 megawatts at peak demand and about 13 million gallons of water last year, while the Papillion facility (Fireball Group LLC) used nearly 548 million gallons. Across six reporting Nebraska data centers, total water use reached 765 million gallons.

1011now.com · 2026-10-04

Study estimates Claude Code AI agent uses up to 5.9 kWh per day of coding tasks

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather analyzed his own usage of Anthropic's Claude Code assistant and calculated that a typical day of work consumed between 1.2 and 5.9 kilowatt-hours of electricity, comparable to running two refrigerators nonstop for a day. He found that 96 percent of the roughly 3.2 billion tokens processed over eight weeks came from the agent repeatedly re-reading its own accumulated memory at each step, rather than generating visible output.

futurism.com · 2026-09-15