A complicated question to answer, I doubt anybody would have a definitively correct answer to it.

The answer is probably both really. It's not like the internet has just stopped expanding and everything is going into AI now. But AI takes up an unproportional amount of the computational power. A data center can house servers for hundreds of different companies or even individuals, all doing different things with them. An AI data center can be dedicated to one singular company who rents out the entire space for hundreds of servers purely for AI.

Much like it'd be difficult to count every human on earth, there will probably never be a definitive number on how much is dedicated to AI. However, a study by the Electric Power Research Institute in 2024 estimated that between 10-20% of data center power consumption came from AI.

That seems relatively low, until you consider that 10-20% is compared to the 80-90% of power that goes towards literally everything else across the entire internet, and it keeps going up rapidly. For every 8-9 servers used for accounting data, sales records, research, communication networks, streaming services, security systems, medical records, multiplayer game servers, automated factory processes, and everything else in the world that computers handle, there are 1-2 servers dedicated ENTIRELY to JUST AI. And the proportion going to AI just keeps going up.

Imagine if among every single factory in the world, 10-20% of them were dedicated to producing nothing but ping pong paddles, and that percent just keeps going up, the growth of ping pong paddle production outpacing the growth of every single other product in the world that comes from a factory. What the fuck do we need that many ping pong paddles for? Are the ping pong paddles really doing enough to justify this massive resource sink??