I mean, they need to give an intuition of the magnitude. Tell me, what do you think when I say “a GPU consumes 1 kW of power”? What does that even mean to the regular Joe?

It is pretty easy to compare against homes because they consume on average 1 kWh of electricity (in the U.S.). It could be something else, but 99% of people have homes they live in, so this is something directly linked to their experiences. So it is not meaningless at all.

GPUs have power ratings: RTX 5090 575W, PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q 300W. Datacenter GPUs are more efficient still--one B200 is 1000W. Use during training consumes more power than inference.