Comment by sfilmeyer

>How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?

tl;dr: rough napkin math and basic googling, 20 MW for a car factory, 100 MW for a chip fab, 2 MW for a hospital, and 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center. Water usage is equivalent to 14 car factories, 52 hospitals, or 18,000 people at home.

Good questions! You made me curious. In the process of looking, I came across this[0] reddit post with a chart comparing various industrial uses. For car assembly specifically, Honda has some nice global data here[1], and their total energy consumption is about 990 MW, split roughly equally between direct and indirect consumption. That's split across something like 60 factories! If I just look at direct energy consumption, that's less than 20 MW per factory.

This[2] has a chip fab at 100 MW. This[3] has an average hospital at 1.7 MW, with the largest use just being heating. I didn't try to look up battery manufacturers. This[4] has a typical apartment at 0.77 W/square foot, which would mean just 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center in the article.

I think a more interesting distinction is water usage. The linked article says that the Fireball LLC datacenter used 548 megagallons of water in 2025. Assuming that aligns with the "water consumption" rather than "water withdrawal" numbers from Honda, that's over 20% as much as the entire global operations of Honda equivalent to 14 factories (adjust by about a factor of two if we should be comparing to water consumption). Alternatively, it's equivalent to 52 hospitals[5] or 18,000 people in their homes[6].

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1tes0rr/ai_data_cen...

[1]https://global.honda/en/environment/initiatives/data/

[2]https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/dotcom/client_serv...

[3]https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/pba/health-care.p...

[4]https://electricityplans.com/how-much-electricity-does-an-ap...

[5]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5058574/ for water usage per square meter for hospitals

[6]https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2017/1131/ofr20171131.pdf for water per person per year