The electricity use of AI is usually quoted per chat query, with values below one watt-hour. For agents that break tasks into many steps, this measure falls short. Eight weeks of logged use of a coding agent came to around 150 watt-hours per task, roughly six hundred times a simple question.
Most of it comes from repeatedly re-reading the accumulated working context. The longer a session runs, the more material each further step processes. The figures are estimates with a wide range, because providers do not disclose energy values per unit of computation.
For companies, this is above all a cost question, since energy and billing follow the same units. We see three simple levers: smaller models for simple tasks, short sessions with a fresh restart, and asking providers about location and electricity mix.