Internet ChatGPT needs as much power as one second of oven per request
According to the developer company OpenAI, one request to the AI software ChatGPT consumes as much electricity as one second of oven operation. The water consumption per request is one fifteenth of a teaspoon.
11.06.2025, 05:49
SDA
OpenAI boss Sam Altman wrote this in a blog entry. For years, there have been warnings of escalating power requirements with the wider use of applications with artificial intelligence. Even if individual demands should actually require less and less energy thanks to efficiency gains in chip and server technology, the mass of use is still causing a sharp increase in electricity demand for AI data centers.
Microsoft, Google and Amazon, among others, want to rely on nuclear energy in the USA. This should help to cover energy requirements without increasing emissions of climate-damaging carbon dioxide.
As the data centers need to be cooled, water consumption is also an issue. In recent years, several studies have attempted to calculate the environmental impact of the increased use of artificial intelligence. However, the researchers have to work with many assumptions.
Confident AI vision
Altman made his statements in a blog entry in which he painted a fundamentally positive picture of the future with artificial intelligence. There will be tough cuts, for example when entire categories of jobs disappear, he admitted. "But on the other hand, the world will become so much richer so quickly" that we will be able to consider previously impossible policy ideas. In connection with artificial intelligence, the idea of a basic income, which could be financed by advances in productivity, has been brought up in recent years.
According to the OpenAI boss, an average ChatGPT request consumes around 0.34 watt-hours. He put the water consumption at 0.000085 gallons (0.00032176 liters). Altman did not provide any further details on the basis for these calculations.
