Jevons Paradox
Why efficiency can increase total consumption — the argument of 2025.
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Jevons (1865) observed that more efficient steam engines increased total coal use: cheaper output finds more uses. Satya Nadella invoked it the week DeepSeek-R1 crashed NVIDIA's stock — cheaper intelligence, he argued, means vastly more intelligence consumed. The 2025 record (token prices down, token volumes and capex up) has so far behaved exactly as the paradox predicts; whether it holds at every scale is unproven.
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Sources
Nadella on Jevons (Jan 2025) ↗
Record reviewed as of 2026-01-15 — see Methodology.