this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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i’m always amazed how it can be so hard for some people to think beyond whatever is immediately in their face
70% of the internet traffic is the fucking internet
just because you don’t like that doesn't matter
Internet traffic is not the internet. Thats like saying cars and trucks are the highway. I can’t believe I have to dumb this down for you, but here goes: T highway is that asphalt thing that sits on the ground between two places, right? And cars and trucks are the things you drive on the highway. So like, in terms of emissions, the highway isn’t producing all those nasty emissions, the cars and trucks are. So if you don’t like those nasty emissions, you can regular the cars and trucks, but the highway isn’t at fault. You could reduce the emissions of the vehicles, replace the cars with more efficient busses, you could even just ride bikes on the highway if you really wanted to. But all these things are separate from the highway itself, see?
Just because you don’t understand how any of this works doesn’t change the fact of the matter which is that the internet is not taking your drinking water.
By your own definition, then AI is now the internet. Prompts and outputs are the cars and trucks, while the data centers and models are the highway. 70% of the internet is running on data centers and models. What makes more of something, 30% or 70%?
Not even. The internet is the highway. The datacenters running the internet are the department of transportation. Average internet users are the compact hybrids, EVs, and cyclists who use the road. Prompts and outputs are the couriers driving various kinds of vehicles. AI datacenters are the giant trucks with smokestacks that smokescreen all the old grannies behind them.
The prompts and outputs traveling over the internet consume a negligible amount of energy. The bulk of it is consumed by training giant LLMs with hundreds of billions of parameters. A lesser portion is consumed by the inferencing those models do to produce outputs, which is done at the AI datacenters, and not what travels over the internet via internet datacenters.
You’ve misunderstood. AI datacenters are not the highway. Prompts and Outputs are the cars and trucks, the AI data centers are the factories making the cars. The highway is datacenters and transmission media that do not house AI and do not require the immense cooling or power that the AI datacenters use. The highway and the things on the highway are two entirely decoupled things.