A single ChatGPT query uses as much energy as a Google search did in 2009
In a romanticized essay on the supposedly imminent singularity, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mentions an interesting fact about ChatGPT's energy consumption: a single ChatGPT request consumes an average of 0.34 watt-hours of power and 0.000085 gallons of water. That energy usage is roughly on par with what a Google search consumed back in 2009, but Altman excludes the fact that ChatGPT is likely handling far more requests per person. And with new AI models like multimodal systems, agents, and advanced reasoning engines demanding even more compute, the rapid expansion of data centers suggests the overall energy appetite of these systems is only increasing.
AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans
Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.
Subscribe nowRead on for the full picture.
Subscribe for hype-free coverage.
- Full access to every article on THE DECODER
- No ads
- Join the comments and community discussions
- A weekly AI news recap via mail
- 6x/year: "AI Radar" — deep dives on the AI topics that matter most
- Daily AI news, always up to date
- Our full ten-year archive
- Covered by a team with 10+ years in AI