Comment by jason_oster

1 day ago

Quick napkin math time!

Steam reached a new peak of 42 million concurrent players today [1]. An average/mid-tier gaming PC uses 0.2 kWh per hour [2]. 42 million * 0.2 gives 8,400,000 kWh per hour, or 8,400 MWh per hour.

By contrast, training GPT3 was estimated to have used 1,300 MWh of energy [3].

This does not account for training costs of newer models, nor inference costs. But we know inference costs are extraordinarily inexpensive and energy efficient [2]. The lowest estimate of energy cost for 1 hour of Steam's peak concurrent player count uses 6.5x more energy than all of the energy that went into training GPT3.

[1]: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/steam-has-already-set-a-ne...

[2]: https://jamescunliffe.co.uk/is-gen-ai-bad-for-the-environmen...

[3]: https://www.theverge.com/24066646/ai-electricity-energy-watt...

4 comments

jason_oster

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y0eswddl  1 day ago

it's very weird to compare LLM training with a subset of gamers.

Who lied to you and told you this was some kind of saving gotcha??

  • jason_oster  1 day ago

    Come again?

    I was skeptical of the LLM energy use claim. I went looking for numbers on energy usage in a domain that most people do not worry about or actively perceive as a net negative. Gaming is a very big industry ($197 billion in 2025 [1], compare to the $252 billion in private AI investment for 2025 [2]) and mostly runs on the same hardware as LLMs. So it's a good gut check.

    I have not seen evidence that LLM energy usage is out of control. It appears to be much less than gaming. But please feel free to provide sources that demonstrate this lie.

    The question is whether claims of AI energy use have sustenance, or if there are other industries that should be more concerning. People are either truly concerned about the cost of energy or it's a misplaced excuse to reinforce their negative opinions.

    [1]: https://gameworldobserver.com/2025/12/23/the-gaming-industry...

    [2]: https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/econo...