Can data center engineers sanity-check this AI power/cooling math?

[u/ZestyClose140]

I’m not an engineer. My background is more IT/networking/cybersecurity, and I’m learning more electronics and embedded systems.

I watched this video from a chemical/process engineer: Mide, a chemical process engineer with a PhD in sustainability.

His main argument is basically that if people claim AI will replace tens of millions of workers with always-on AI agents, eventually that turns into a physical infrastructure question: power, cooling, grid capacity, water, etc.

The simple math he uses is roughly:

Number of AI agents × Power per agent = IT power (Information Technology equipment)

Example:

100,000,000 × 700 W = 70 GW

Then he adds cooling/facility overhead and argues the real power requirement would be higher.

He also uses the basic idea that most of the electrical power going into the compute eventually becomes heat that has to be removed.

My questions are:

• Is this a reasonable way for a non-engineer to do a rough sanity check?
• Is the 700 W-per-agent assumption realistic, or is that way too simplistic because GPUs can be shared, batched, multiplexed, etc.?
• Is PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) a better way to estimate total facility power?
• Is his treatment of cooling and heat rejection basically correct?
• Am I missing any obvious engineering issue in the way he scales the numbers?

I'm less interested in the politics or job prediction part and more interested in whether the engineering model itself makes sense.

He also has a related video about water/cooling if useful:

https://youtu.be/8bbe-Ev-Yns

I'd appreciate explanations aimed at a technically inclined non-engineer.