OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has disclosed for the primary time the common power and water consumption of a single ChatGPT question, which is way lower than what analysts and environmentalists had projected all this time.
“The common question makes use of about 0.34 watt-hours,” Altman stated in a weblog put up titled The Light Singularity. “It additionally makes use of about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one-fifteenth of a teaspoon.”
For comparability, 0.34 watt-hours is equal to operating a high-efficiency lightbulb for a few minutes.
In keeping with a examine on ChatGPT’s water consumption by A. Shaji George, an knowledgeable in Info and Communications Know-how (ICT), the AI chatbot consumes 0.5 litres of water throughout every of its prolonged conversations with a person. This is applicable to all AI methods and LLMs in place. Half a litre of water would imply the quantity required to prepare dinner two packets of Maggi on the spot noodles.
In keeping with information supplied by Semrush, ChatGPT was ranked because the eighth most visited website on the earth as of March 2025, with roughly 5.56 billion visits.
In the meantime, analysis reveals that each query probably makes use of round 10 instances extra electrical energy than a easy Google search, with a mean of two.9 watt-hours of power. Nonetheless, Altman’s estimate is sort of one-tenth of what analysts projected.
Beforehand, he shared that well mannered courtesies with ChatGPT, akin to “please” and “thanks,” have price the corporate tens of tens of millions of {dollars} in electrical energy bills.
This revelation comes amid growing scrutiny of AI’s useful resource utilization as fashions develop in dimension and adoption.
Altman additionally laid out a longer-term forecast on AI price developments, stating, “As datacenter manufacturing will get automated, the price of intelligence ought to ultimately converge to close the price of electrical energy.”
Environmental analysts observe that whereas per-query utilization is low, combination consumption stays a priority. With lots of of tens of millions of queries every day, power and water use from AI information centres may develop considerably.
In the identical put up, Altman acknowledged these broader implications, saying, “The financial worth creation has began a flywheel of compounding infrastructure buildout to run these increasingly-powerful AI methods.”
The discharge of those statistics seems to be a part of OpenAI’s broader try to enhance transparency about its AI infrastructure. As public and regulatory curiosity in AI’s environmental affect grows, such disclosures are prone to play a bigger function in shaping each firm coverage and public notion.
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