Stack Overflow questions per year

Stack Overflow questions per year and U.S. data center electricity consumption have, between 2015 and 2023, moved in opposite directions at a correlation of -0.979. The canonical programmer Q&A site began its long, final decline right as the servers powering large language models began their vertical ascent. The chart is practically a confession. The same infrastructure that is using the electricity is, fairly directly, the reason the site has gone quiet.

Stack Overflow question volume peaked around 2014 and drifted downward through the 2015-2022 period before collapsing in 2023 as developers moved their confused-at-3am traffic to ChatGPT and Copilot. U.S. data center electricity consumption grew from around 60 TWh in 2015 to well over 170 TWh by 2023, with an increasing share of the late-period growth attributable to AI training and inference workloads. The two trends share a single, slightly uncomfortable confound: the thing consuming the electricity is the thing replacing the questions.

Nine years of two lines moving oppositely can describe one generation of programmer help being replaced by another. The forum emptied. The data centre filled up.