I asked because that's the average power consumption of an average household in the US per day. So, if that figure is per hour, that's equivalent to one household worth of power consumption per hour...which is a lot.

Others clarified the kW versus kWh, but to re-visit the comparison to a household:

One household uses about 30 kWh per day.

20 kW * 24 = 480 kWh per day for the server.

So you're looking at one server (if parent's 20kW number is accurate - I see other sources saying even 25kW) consuming 16 households worth of energy.

For comparison, a hair dryer uses around 1.5 kW of energy, which is just below the rating for most US home electrical circuits. This is something like 13 hair dryers going on full blast.

Which honestly doesn't sound that bad given how many users one server is able to serve.

At least with GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, I gather most of the AI inference isn't rendering cat videos but mostly useful work.. so I don't feel tooo bad about 16 households worth of energy.

To be fair, this is 16 households of electrical energy. The average household uses about as much electrical energy as it uses energy in form of natural gas (or butane or fuel oil, depending on what they use). And then roughly as much gasoline as they use electricity. So really more like 5 households of energy. And that's just your direct energy use, not accounting for all the products including food consumed in the average household.

Consumption of a house per day is measured in kiloWatt-hours (an amount of power like litres of water), not kiloWatts (a flow of power like 1 litre per second of water).

1 Watt = 1 Joule per second.

Thanks!

I think you are confusing KW (kilowatt) with KWH (kilowatt hour).

A KW is a unit of power while a KWH is a unit of energy. Power is a measure of energy transferred in an amount of time, which is why you rate an electronic device’s energy usage using power; it consumes energy over time.

In terms of paying for electricity, you care about the total energy consumed, which is why your electric bill is denominated in KWH, which is the amount of energy used if you use one kilowatt of power for one hour.

You're right, I absolutely was mixing them both. Thanks for clarifying!

Acktshually "kW" and "kWh" to be precise

Ah yes, like those EV chargers that are rated at X kWh/hour.

You would hope that an EV reporting x kWh/hour considers the charge curve when charging for an hour. Then it makes sense to report that instead of the peak kW rating. But reality is that they just report the peak kW rating as the "kWh/hour" :-(