Big Tech’s dream of advancing AI is coming with a huge, often overlooked cost: electricity. The amount of power that companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple use to run their data centers is staggering—so much so that their energy consumption is now on par with entire countries.

A recent graphic from Visual Capitalist compares the electricity use of these tech giants in 2023 with that of some nations. The numbers are shocking. Both Google and Microsoft each consumed 24 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in a year. To put that in perspective, that’s more power than what countries like Jordan, with a population of 11 million people, or Ghana, with 34 million people, use.

This enormous energy consumption is largely driven by the need to power and cool massive data centers that are crucial for the operations of these companies. These data centers aren’t just storing files or processing emails anymore—they’re doing heavy-duty work like training AI models, which dema...