How much energy and water does ChatGPT consume?

Artificial intelligence has been the hottest topic in tech since late 2022, when ChatGPT went viral. The AI race started almost immediately, with every big … The post How much energy and water does ChatGPT consume? appeared first on BGR.

Jun 12, 2025 - 20:30

How much energy and water does ChatGPT consume?

OpenAI debuts ChatGPT o3 and o4-mini models.

Artificial intelligence has been the hottest topic in tech since late 2022, when ChatGPT went viral. The AI race started almost immediately, with every big tech company in the US and elsewhere working on new AI systems of their own.

We quickly learned that software like ChatGPT requires massive resources. Datacenters packing thousands of expensive GPUs specialized in training and running AI chatbots were needed. The larger the data centers, the more energy the world would need to set aside for AI projects.

Some people worried about the impact AI infrastructure would have on the world. It wasn’t just about the electricity powering the chats, but also the water used to cool some of these data centers.

Two and a half years after ChatGPT went viral, we finally know how much energy and power a ChatGPT chat consumes. It comes from Sam Altman’s latest blog, titled The Gentle Singularity, which teases what the world could look like in the next five to ten years thanks to superintelligence:

People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.

It’s unclear where Altman’s figure comes from. If accurate, I’ll probably consume about a teaspoon of water with AI queries every day. But the figure is also misleading, considering that OpenAI has hundreds of millions of monthly users.

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