There’s been a lot of talk lately about how AI might be destroying the planet. People point to massive data centers, power-hungry GPUs, and all the hype around new AI features in every product. But a new analysis from TRG Datacenters suggests something that cuts against the current narrative. If you’re worried about the carbon footprint of digital life, you might want to look at your streaming habits first.
The study compared the power usage and CO₂ emissions of common online activities. That includes streaming video, sending emails, using voice assistants, generating images with AI, and asking questions to chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini. The numbers are based on average power draw converted into CO₂ output, so you can compare each activity directly.
Streaming stands out immediately. Watching YouTube or Netflix in HD for one hour generates around 42 grams of CO₂. That sounds small in isolation, but it’s the highest of anything measured in the report. It comes from how streaming works. Every second of video requires ongoing data transfer from servers, along with processing on both ends. It isn’t a one-and-done computation. It’s continuous.
Do that every day and it adds up. Two hours of streaming daily equals more than 30 kilograms of CO₂ each year. And that’s just video. It doesn’t count games, social posts, Discord calls, or whatever else people have running in the background. This is one of those things where individuals don’t really feel the impact, but the scale of the web means the totals get large fast.
AI video generation comes in behind streaming, at around 17.5 grams of CO₂ to create a short clip. Text-to-video requires heavy computation, so this placement makes sense. But even here, it’s still less than streaming an hour of something you’re barely paying attention to.
A one-hour Zoom call is roughly the same at around 17 grams of CO₂. Anyone who works remote probably racks up quite a bit of this without thinking about it. The constant encoding, decoding, and video feeds have a cost. Not a world-ending one, just a constant background draw of energy.
Email is where things get unexpectedly noticeable. A simple email without attachments produces about 4.7 grams of CO₂. A single message is trivial. But multiply that by thousands per person, per workplace, per server, per day, and the numbers become real. Those massive email archives sitting in cloud storage don’t just sit in a warehouse with the lights off.
Then you get down to AI image generation. One generated image is about 1 gram of CO₂. That’s not zero, but it’s a long way from the idea that every AI art request is melting the ice caps. Chatbot queries like ChatGPT or Google search sit at around 0.1 grams per prompt. Gemini text prompts come in slightly below that.
So in plain terms: AI prompts barely register compared to binge-watching.
This doesn’t mean AI is harmless. It just means the narrative that “AI is uniquely bad” isn’t really supported here. The study suggests that all digital behavior has a carbon cost. The difference is mostly scale and frequency. People stream video constantly. They don’t ask 10,000 chatbot questions a day.
The bigger point made by TRG Datacenters is what’s happening at the infrastructure level. The tech industry produced around 900 million tons of CO₂ last year. Only about 30 percent of data center power currently comes from renewable sources. If that shifted to something like 80 or 90 percent, every number in this report would drop, without anyone needing to change their habits.
That’s where the real problem is. The average person doesn’t have the power to redesign how global data centers run. And very few people are going to stop streaming shows they enjoy. The path forward is the energy grid, not consumer guilt.
So yes, streaming has a bigger footprint than asking a chatbot a question. It always has. But the real story is that the internet runs on electricity, and the electricity mix still comes from a lot of fossil fuel. Until that changes, every digital choice leaves a trace. Some more than others.
It’s probably more productive to focus on pressuring companies to run their infrastructure on clean power instead of telling people to watch fewer shows. The emissions difference between streaming and AI is interesting, but the fix is upstream.
