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How much energy does AI actually consume?
24/9/2025
10 min read
Feature
There are serious concerns about the energy consumption of AI systems – in particular large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. We know they use a lot of energy during training – the process by which the millions or billions of parameters in the model ingest and analyse data. Apparently, training OpenAI’s GPT-4 (with well over a trillion parameters) consumed over 50 GWh of electricity. Toby Clark asks, how much energy do they use to answer your queries?
This is the ‘inference stage’ – whether it involves a text-only query, generating images or video, or operating as an agent to interact with other sources of information – and most sources reckon it is the most significant in terms of energy use.
Public statements about energy consumption from the firms behind proprietary AI models – OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, for instance – are rare. However, in June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman blogged: ‘People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 Wh.’ This was seized upon, with much comment and calculation – but no more detail emerged.
If you ask ChatGPT ‘How much energy is this query using?’, it comes up with a similar figure of 0.1–1 Wh. Grok, xAI’s open-source chatbot, says ‘a ballpark estimate for a single Grok query might be in the range of 0.02–0.05 Wh’ – relatively frugal.