I run Claude Code most of my day. agent loops firing all day, one after another. the usage screen tells me I'm at 26% of my weekly limit. it doesn't tell me what that 26% weighs anywhere else. it feels free.
It isn't.
A single chat reply costs about 0.3 watt-hours — the energy an LED bulb burns in under two minutes. Simon P. Couch measured actual Claude Code sessions and got a median of 41 Wh — 130x a plain message. Simon Willison put his own daily habit at the equivalent of 4,400 typical queries. His comparison: a dishwasher, or a fridge running 24 hours.
KAIST measured agents specifically this year not chat, agents that reason and act across steps. A 70 billion parameter agent — a model roughly the size of what real commercial products run on, not a toy — averaged 348.41 Wh per query. 136.5x a normal query. Scaled up, researchers project close to 200 gigawatts globally just for agents deciding what to do next. A gigawatt is what a small country's whole grid can push out at once.
One dev. One agent open all day. Willison's own number: 1 to 1.5 kWh on a heavy day. Not a lab estimate. His actual habit.
Average Nigerian: 165 kWh a year. 0.45 kWh a day. Lights, a phone charge, a fan through the heat. That's the whole ration.
I'm writing this from Port Harcourt. Friday, I was on a video call with a product manager at Cloudflare — he was walking me through a demo, asking what I thought. It started raining. The light went. The internet went with it, mid-sentence, no goodbye. That's the wire I'm on, talking to someone at a company whose servers never blink.
Building the reconciliation agent for the hackathon that same week, I caught myself mid-build — one stretch, maybe a few minutes, and the token count had already crossed 10k. I wasn't even done. That's one exchange, one agent, one afternoon, running on the grid that dropped a call over rain.
That night I googled it. how much one of these sessions actually costs, in power, not dollars. the number that came back stopped me mid-scroll.
One coding session. One dev. More power than an entire day of an entire person's life, in the country I'm typing this from.
Gartner: global data centers hit 565 terawatt-hours (TWh) this year — the unit whole countries use to measure their power grids. AI-optimized servers alone not data centers overall, just the AI slice — went from 95 TWh in 2025 to 175 TWh in 2026. An 84% jump. One segment. One year.
Nigeria: 40.7 TWh a year, total, country-wide. Less than half of installed capacity reliably reaches anyone. AI-dedicated servers alone will burn more than four times what my entire country produces. This year.
It's not coming off Nigeria's grid. Different continent, different wire. Nobody dims Port Harcourt to run my prompt.
Cheap for a dev paying $20 a month for Claude Pro. Cheap for a hyperscaler burning gigawatts to keep a chatbot responsive. Nowhere near cheap for the 61% of Nigerians who had grid access in 2022 or the rest who never did.
I needed the work done. I'm not apologizing for the sessions.
I am done pretending they cost nothing.
Every agent loop you fire off casually costs more than someone else's entire day, somewhere, always. You just don't see the meter.
I saw mine. It didn't look like a coding tool anymore.
I'm half sick writing this. And some of you reading it will paste it into an LLM to draft a smart-sounding reply for the comments. That's the loop. That's the whole joke, and it isn't funny.