Snapchat daily active users

Snapchat's daily active users and U.S. data center electricity consumption have, between 2015 and 2023, risen together at a correlation of 0.969. Disappearing photos and the permanent servers that process them, climbing together. The irony of a platform whose core feature is impermanence requiring a rising baseline of electricity to work is, one hopes, not lost on its engineers.

Snapchat DAU grew from around 110 million in 2015 to over 400 million by 2023, driven by international growth, Stories, AR lenses, and Snap Maps. U.S. data center electricity consumption grew from around 60 TWh to over 170 TWh in the same window, driven by cloud migration, crypto, and early AI workloads. Both trends are products of the same decade's reshuffling of the attention economy — one sitting on top of the compute stack, one sitting inside it — and both are still climbing for reasons the next decade will have to manage.

Eight years of two lines rising together can describe an app that deletes its content still requiring more electricity to work each year. Nothing is ever entirely ephemeral on the grid.