15 December 2025
Where does artificial intelligence (AI) live in the physical world? Not in the cloud, but in industrial vaults of silicon and steel. Its life depends on the same electrical grids that power our cities, and now it’s starting to rival them in consumption. “Generative AI changes the contract between humans and technology: before AI, interaction meant adapting to machines; after AI, machines adapt to us,” says Snowflake’s CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy. This helps explain the dramatic surge in adoption: to command remarkably sophisticated systems, turns out all one needs is basic literacy. ChatGPT now counts more than 700 million weekly users a mere three years after launch and it is hard to find a company in 2025 not trying to incorporate AI into its operations.
Written by: Ignacio Louzan and Konstantin Tumanov
Project Director: Hannah Pall and Ladislao Cazes
Source: McKinsey
