How much energy does artificial intelligence use? People who know do not say

“People often My curiosity about the amount of energy used by ChatGPT “,” Sam TamanCEO of OpenaiWritten on aspect in a Long blog post Last week. Altman Books, average query, uses 0.34 watts an hour of energy: “About what the oven will use in a little more than one second, or a highly efficient lamp that will use it in a few minutes.”

For a company that includes 800 million users per week active (and Growth) The issue of the amount of energy used by all these searches is increasingly urgent. But experts say that Altman does not mean much of the general context of Openai about how she reaches this account – including defining what “medium” query is, whether or not it includes pictures, and whether Altman includes an additional use of energy, such as training on AI models and Openai cooling.

As a result, Sasha Lakkoni, a leader in the climate at Ai Company Huging Face, does not put much shares on Altman number. “He could have pulled it out of his ass.” (Openai did not respond to more information about how he reached this number.)

Since artificial intelligence takes over our lives, it is also a promise to convert our energy systems, which leads to carbon emissions properly and we are trying to fight climate change. Now, a new and growing collection of research is trying to put difficult numbers on the amount of carbon from which we already emit with all our artificial intelligence.

This effort is complicated by the fact that the main players like Openai reveal a little about environmental information. An analysis presented to the pendant review this week by Lucioni and three other authors looking for a need for more environmental transparency in artificial intelligence models. In the new analysis of Luccioni, she and her colleagues use data from OpenROUTERLLM, the leading model of the Model Traffic Traffic (LLM), to find that 84 percent of LLM was used in May 2025 was for models that did not contain zero environmental detection. This means that consumers greatly choose models with environmental effects that are not fully known.

“It is amazing that you can buy a car and know the number of miles for each gallon you consume, yet we use all these artificial intelligence tools every day and we have no efficiency measures and emissions factors and nothing at all.” “It is not a delegate, it is not organizational. Given what we are with the climate crisis, it should be at the highest agenda of organizers everywhere.”

As a result of this lack of transparency, Lukoni says, the audience is exposed to meaningless estimates but taken as a gospel. You may have heard, for example, that the average Chatgpt request takes 10 times the energy like the average Google search. Lucioni and her colleagues tracked this allegation to a general note that John Hennessy, the president of the Gogle’s parent company, was presented in 2023.

The claim made by a member of the Board of Directors from one company (Google) about the product of another company that has no relationship (Openai) is weak at best – finds Luccioni analysis, that this number has been repeatedly repeated in the press and policy reports. (While I was writing this piece, I got a stadium with this careful statistic.)