AI Carbon Footprint
Calculator
Calculate how much energy, carbon and water your AI usage actually consumes — across every tool in your stack.
How do you use AI?
Pick a profile to pre-fill your estimate — then fine-tune below.
What your AI use costs the planet
Where your AI use lands
Light AI userYour biggest draw is GPT-4o. Switching it to Gemini Nano could cut your energy by ~97%. See Gemini Nano →
Frequently asked questions
How much energy does ChatGPT use?
A typical ChatGPT query running GPT-4o uses about 0.43 Wh of electricity — roughly 1.4 times a Google search (~0.3 Wh). OpenAI's Sam Altman has cited an average of 0.34 Wh, and independent estimates from Epoch AI (~0.3 Wh) and Jegham et al. (0.42 Wh) all put it at a fraction of a watt-hour. Longer prompts cost more: a heavy 1,000-token exchange is closer to 1.2 Wh, and very large contexts can reach tens of watt-hours. Lightweight models such as GPT-4o mini use roughly three times less.
How much water does AI use per query?
Most of the water goes to cooling the data centres that run the model. A single short query uses only a few millilitres, but it adds up: independent research suggests a typical ChatGPT session of 10–50 messages can evaporate on the order of 500 mL of water. The exact figure depends heavily on the data centre's location and cooling design — arid regions and older evaporative cooling use far more per query than water-free or cold-climate sites.
Is AI bad for the environment?
Any single query is tiny — comparable to a Google search or a few seconds of a lightbulb. The concern is scale. AI and data centres consumed about 415 TWh of electricity in 2024 and are projected to reach 945 TWh by 2030, alongside rising water use for cooling. Spread across billions of daily queries, individual choices — using smaller models, keeping prompts short, and favouring cleaner-grid regions — compound into a meaningful difference.
Which AI model is the most energy-efficient?
Efficiency varies enormously: across the 166 models tracked here, the heaviest uses over 160,000 times more energy per query than the lightest. Smaller, distilled models — such as GPT-4o mini, Gemini Flash and Claude Haiku — typically use a small fraction of their flagship siblings' energy while handling most everyday tasks just as well. Browse the directory sorted by energy to compare models like for like.