OpenAI and Alleged Environmental Costs: No Problem

March 28, 2025

We know ChatGPT uses an obscene amount of energy and water. But it can be difficult to envision exactly how much. Digg offers some helpful infographics in, "Do You Know How Much Energy ChatGPT Actually Uses?" Writer Darcy Jimenez tells us:

"Since it was first released in 2022, ChatGPT has gained a reputation for being particularly bad for the environment — for example, the GPT-4 model uses as many as 0.14 kilowatt-hours (kWh) generating something as simple as a 100-word email. It can be tricky to fully appreciate the environmental impact of using ChatGPT, though, so the researchers at Business Energy UK made some visualizations to help. Using findings from a 2023 research paper, they calculated the AI chatbot’s estimated water and electricity usage per day, week, month and year, assuming its 200 million weekly users feed it five prompts per day."

See the post for those enlightening graphics. Here are just a few of the astounding statistics:

"Electricity: each day, ChatGPT uses 19.99 million kWh. That’s enough power to charge 4 million phones, or run the Empire State Building for 270 days. … ChatGPT uses a whopping 7.23 billion kWh per year, which is more electricity than the world’s 112 lowest-consumption countries consume over the same period. It’s also enough to power every home in Wyoming for two and a half years."

And:

"Water: The 19.58 million gallons ChatGPT drinks every day could fill a bath for each of Colorado Springs’s 488,664 residents. That amount is also equivalent to everyone in Belgium flushing their toilet at the same time. … In the space of a year, the chatbot uses 7.14 billion gallons of water. That’s enough to fill up the Central Park Reservoir seven times, or power Las Vegas’s Fountains of Bellagio shows for almost 600 years."

Wow. See the write-up for more mind-boggling comparisons. Dolphin lovers and snail darter fans may want to check out the write up.

Cynthia Murrell, March 28, 2025

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Financial, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.