Energy cost of Agentic AI

I have been thinking about this recently as we set a carbon emission baseline at the NPO I work for.

We know the environmental impact of data centers, and also the positive examples. I have built partnerships with data centers in Switzerland that sit above 1000m sea level (above 3200ft), where it's cold enough to skip most of the cooling, run on renewable energy, and use the generated heat to supply

the local cheese factory 🧀

We also have numbers for the water and energy behind a single chatbot conversation, although honestly those vary wildly depending on who's counting and what they count.

But does - and if yes how - agentic AI break that?. One request isn't one conversation anymore. It's tool calls, retries, sub-agents, all invisible to the person who asked. So the per-message figures we've been quoting don't really add up to anything.

Does anyone have experiences, concrete numbers or case studies on this?

I'm aware I could have asked AI, but wanted to start a conversation here first 😅

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Energy cost of Agentic AI