Al's Power Demand: Calculating ChatGPT's Electricity Consumption for Handling over 365 billion User Queries Every Year

AI startup OpenAl recently revealed that its groundbreaking chatbot, ChatGPT, has reached 300 million weekly active users, doubling the number it had in September 2023.

-  Paul Hoffman

This rapid growth has made ChatGPT one of the fastest-growing and most popular apps of all time. Beyond answering basic questions, this powerful tool can compose entire essays in seconds, engage in human-like conversations, generate images, solve complex math problems, translate texts, and even write code. However, ChatGPT consumes a lot of energy in the process, reportedly nearly ten times more than traditional Google searches.

With this in mind, the team at BestBrokers decided to put into perspective the considerable amount of electric power OpenAl's chatbot uses to respond to prompts on a yearly basis. We also looked at what that would cost at the average U.S. commercial electricity rate of USD 0.132 per kWh as of October 2024 (the latest rates published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration). After running the numbers, it turned out that for answering questions alone, ChatGPT consumes a whopping 1.059 billion kilowatt-hours on average every year, which amounts to an expenditure of USD 139.7 million.

I'll ChatGPT it

When you submit a query to a trained Al model like ChatGPT, the process is known as inference. This involves passing your query through the model's parameters, which allows the model to spot a pattern and generate a response from the available data. Estimating the energy required for that process is a bit tricky, however, as it depends on many variables, such as query length, number of users, and how efficiently the model runs. In most cases, this information is kept private. Still, we can make some rough calculations to get a sense of the amount of electricity that will be needed.

Apparently, each time you ask ChatGPT a question, it uses about 0.0029 kilowatt-hours of electricity. This is nearly ten times more than the energy needed for a typical Google search, which consumes about 0.0003 kilowatt-hours per query, according to The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).