Your team just shipped an ML inference endpoint. Stakeholders are asking uncomfortable questions about environmental impact. Someone forwards a scary headline about AI boiling the oceans. Your PM wants numbers by Friday.

Sound familiar? I've been there twice in the last year alone. And here's what I've learned: most of the numbers people throw around about AI resource consumption are either wildly out of context or completely made up. The real problem isn't that AI uses resources — everything does — it's that most teams have zero visibility into their specific footprint.

Let's fix that.

The actual problem: you're flying blind

When someone asks "how much water does our AI stuff use?" most developers shrug. Fair enough — your cloud provider abstracts away the physical infrastructure. But that abstraction is exactly what makes the conversation so frustrating.…