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The Internet uses on the order of 10% of the world's electricity. A 10x difference is huge.



Out of curiosity - what's the source on that? Most figures I've seen put datacenter usage an order of magnitude lower:

e.g. https://www.iea.org/reports/tracking-buildings/data-centres-...

"Global data centre electricity demand in 2018 was an estimated 198 TWh, or almost 1% of global final demand for electricity (Masanet et al., 2018)."


This random site from I found by googling: https://www.insidescandinavianbusiness.com/article.php?id=35... I was surprised by that number myself, because I also thought that it was in the single digits.


It should be noted that report is talking about the client devices too - desktop, laptops, and even TVs. The datacenters part only accounted for 15% of that.




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