According to Surfshark, if you take the global daily number of ChatGPT queries (roughly 2.5 billion), you could run around 200,000 air conditioners for 24 hours. This means you could cool down the whole city of Miami, Lyon, or Canberra for a full day: https://surfshark.com/research/chart/chatbots-energy-consumption
“Each ChatGPT query produces an estimated 4.32 grams of CO₂. Training AI models is the biggest part of the issue, because it requires the capacity of an enormous number of servers that consume electricity 24/7. Besides, servers need to be cooled down, and this consumes millions of litres of water. AI contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, requiring greater responsibility from all parties involved in its development and use. Sustainable everyday AI use matters, too,” points out Tomas Ivanaitis, Head of Data & AI at Surfshark.
A Surfshark expert believes that sustainable AI use is about wise operations, not about abandoning the technology.
Key advice from Tomas Ivanaitis:
Prompt responsibly: no need to generate 50 queries for the same small thing when it’s possible to immediately formulate the task accurately.
Use when it’s truly needed: if you can write a two-line email yourself in 10 seconds, then why ask an AI to write you five paragraphs that the other party will still read in the same 10 seconds?
Use smaller models for work: companies and IT developers should use smaller, task-specific models instead of deploying giant GPT-4 or Gemini PRO-level models for every simple question. It’s like driving a tank to the grocery store for milk.
Other key study findings:
One ChatGPT query consumes energy equivalent to running a 40W mini cooling fan for about three minutes. Similarly, a single query uses the same amount of energy as charging your phone with a 5W charger for 24 minutes. Finally, running a standard 550W household refrigerator for one hour uses roughly as much energy as 277 ChatGPT queries.
Each ChatGPT query produces an estimated 4.32 grams of CO₂. For instance, just one day of everyone in the US making a single query could emit around 1479 metric tons of CO₂ — roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of about 322 average gasoline cars, or the same carbon footprint as 1,500 people flying from London to New York and back.
If every person in the UK made a single query to ChatGPT, it would use an estimated 137 MWh of energy. To put this into perspective, this amount of energy could power approximately 47 average UK homes for an entire year, given that the average household in the UK consumes about 2.9 MWh annually.
For the complete research material behind this study, click here.
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