Your device is already powered. The data center is not.

Loci is gentler on the planet in two ways, and they stack: the model on your device uses far less power to answer you, and asking it doesn't add to the case for building more data centers. One is about a single answer. The other is about everything being built to serve answers at scale.

1. The model is smaller, so the answer costs less power

The AI behind the big cloud chatbots is enormous. Frontier models are estimated to hold on the order of a trillion internal settings, the numbers a model tunes to work out a response. A model Loci downloads to your device holds a few billion. That is roughly a hundred to a thousand times fewer moving parts doing the math behind your answer.

Fewer parts means less computation, and less computation means less electricity. Your device answers on hardware you already use instead of waking racks of specialized processors in a warehouse, plus the storage, networking, and cooling wrapped around them.

We won't print a fake "kilowatt-hours saved" number, because the honest figure depends on which device, cloud model, data center, and power grid you compare. What we will say is simple and checkable: a model a hundred times smaller, running on hardware you already own, is doing far less work to answer you.

2. Using it doesn't vote for the next data center

Here is the part that rarely gets said out loud. Every question sent to a cloud AI is also a demand signal. Providers watch usage climb, forecast the capacity they'll need, and raise money to build it. Your queries are part of the business case for the next facility.

That business case is now staggering. The five largest tech companies spent more than $400 billion building this infrastructure in 2025, more than the world invests in producing oil and gas, and they expect to raise that by roughly three quarters in 2026. In the United States, data centers are on track to draw more electricity than making aluminum, steel, cement, and every other heavy industrial good combined.

A question you ask Loci never enters that ledger. It runs on your device and it's gone. It isn't counted, forecast, or used to justify the next build. You're using a model that already exists instead of adding weight to the argument for a bigger one.

And that argument is not landing well where the buildout actually happens. In a 2026 Gallup poll, about 7 in 10 Americans said they'd oppose a data center being built near them, and more said they'd rather live beside a nuclear plant. Loci lets you use AI without feeding the thing your neighbors keep showing up to town halls to stop.

What we won't claim

Loci is not zero energy. Nothing is. Powering your device uses electricity, and downloading the model once uses a connection.

What's true is structural: a smaller model, on a chip you already own, with no facility to cool and no query to send, is a fundamentally different footprint than the cloud default.

Sources

• Gallup, Americans Oppose Data Centers in Their Area (May 2026)
• IEA, Energy and AI — data center electricity demand and investment
• MIT News, Explained: generative AI's environmental impact (2025)
• Strubell, Ganesh, and McCallum, Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP
• Google 2025 Environmental Report
• Microsoft 2025 Environmental Sustainability Report