Accenture had its worst trading day in history last week, with shares falling as much as 20% intraday and closing down nearly 18%. While earnings per-share beat estimates, free cash flow came in at $3.6 billion, and operating margins expanded, the damage came from the Outlook: bookings fell, guidance for the current quarter landed below Wall Street expectations, and management trimmed its full-year growth forecast, with roughly $400 million of the quarter’s softness tied to the war in the Middle East. Accenture’s stock is now down roughly 57% over the past 12 months, and total return over five years sits at around -50%. Bloomberg Intelligence attributed the sell-off to AI disrupting demand across consulting and managed services. The article questions the assumption that AI is cheap, noting that training GPT-3 required roughly 1,287 megawatt-hours of electricity and emitted about 502 metric tons of CO2. Inference can account for up to 60% of AI’s total energy footprint, and a single ChatGPT query uses roughly 100 times the energy of a typical search. OpenAI disclosed an average ChatGPT query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, Google published roughly 0.24 watt-hours for a Gemini text prompt, and independent estimates put a typical Claude Sonnet query between 0.8 and 5.5 watt-hours. AI o3 and DeepSeek-R1 have been benchmarked consuming over 33 watt-hours for a single