AI energy forecasts may be missing large-scale inference demand

Published on May 27, 2026 7:22 AM GMTUpdate after publication: Mo Putera pointed me to SemiAnalysis data on real Opus 4.7 agentic workflows, which pushed my central estimates for both token usage and blended token price substantially downward. The original version used ~140M tokens per 8-hour workday-equivalent and ~$5 per 1M tokens; I now use assumptions closer to ~10M tokens and ~$1 per 1M tokens, but still with wide probability distributions. This makes the energy bottleneck look less immedia...