AI energy use
AI Powered by Water and Sun
AI is quietly becoming one of the world's great electricity consumers. It does not have to be, and with MATE it is not.
What the AI boom is doing to the grid
Behind every chat window is a building full of machines, and those buildings are getting enormous. A single large AI data centre now uses as much electricity as a small town, and somebody has to generate it. That somebody is usually a power station near people who never asked for it.
One building, a hundred thousand homes
That is the electricity a typical AI data centre uses, according to the International Energy Agency. The biggest ones going up right now will use twenty times more.
New gas plants, built to feed them
In Louisiana, three new gas power stations were approved to supply a single data centre. Construction began last winter, and seven more are planned for the same site.
Old coal plants kept running
Coal stations that were due to close are staying open instead, because the demand has to come from somewhere. Two American utilities said exactly that in their own filings.
And the bill lands on everyone
The watchdog for America's biggest power grid found data centres to be the main reason electricity there got more expensive. That shows up in ordinary households' bills.
We changed the two things we control
We cannot change how the industry builds. We can change what our own machines run on, and whether they have to switch on at all.
- Data centres that belong to us
- Electricity fully renewable across the year
- Roughly half hydropower, half solar
- Real electricity, not purchased certificates
- On-device needs no data centre at all
Why this is a promise and not a slogan
Rent the space and you inherit the fuel
A service running on someone else's cloud has that landlord's energy mix. Where the building sits and what it burns is not their decision to make. Ours is, because the buildings are ours.
Small and spread out, on purpose
Our sites are modest and distributed. They do not need a power station of their own, and no region has to build one to keep us running.
Half water, half sun
Across the year our electricity is entirely renewable, roughly half hydropower and half solar. We say across the year because the sun does not shine at night and the machines keep running.
Real electricity, not certificates
Most providers buy renewable certificates against a bill and call the result green. This is the actual power feeding the machines. Harder, more expensive, and the only version that changes what has to be generated.
The request that goes nowhere
On-device Mode answers on the phone in your hand. No network, no server, no cooling, no capacity held idle waiting for you. Nothing an assistant does uses less.
The computing we never do
Profiling you, targeting ads and training on your conversations all burn real electricity. MATE does none of it, so none of that power gets spent on you. Privacy and energy turn out to want the same thing.
Your own number, in the app
MATE can show an estimate of the energy, water and CO2 behind each answer, and add them up over time. Nobody publishes a verified figure for AI energy use, so we show you yours instead.
This is being decided right now
Forecasts for the next decade differ by more than double, because the outcome depends on what gets built in the next few years. Every request handled on renewable power is one that does not become the case for another gas plant.
See where your requests actually go
The technology page shows the route each request takes, what leaves your device, and what powers the rest.