Watts are energy per time, so maybe your phone did use 1.21GW, but for only a very short period of time

A typical phone battery has 11Wh of energy, that’s
11Wh / 1.21GW = 0.0000327s
To fully expend all the energy in the battery

Assuming your meme is something like 50kB, you’ll need to transmit at
50kB / 3.27e-5 = 1.5GBps
to fully transfer the meme before running out of juice