GitHub Copilot Environmental Impact

Energy Consumption

GitHub Copilot consumes approximately 1.5 Wh per code completion or suggestion. It uses GPT-4 class models under the hood. Unlike chat queries, Copilot makes frequent short requests as you type — a typical coding session might trigger dozens of completions per hour, adding up to significant cumulative energy use for heavy users.

Power Source & Carbon

GitHub Copilot runs on Microsoft Azure, primarily in US data centers. GitHub does not offer region-level control for standard users. For enterprise customers, data residency is available in the EU, Australia, US, and Japan, which may route inference to different grid regions with varying carbon intensity.

Water Usage

At approximately 10 mL per completion, individual requests are modest. However, active developers may trigger 50-100+ completions per hour, consuming 500 mL to 1 liter of water per hour of active coding with Copilot enabled.

How much energy does GitHub Copilot use per query?

Each GitHub Copilot query consumes approximately 1.5 Wh of energy. This is 5x more than a traditional Google search (~0.3 Wh).

What is GitHub Copilot's carbon footprint?

Based on the carbon intensity of Azure US (primarily East), each query produces approximately 1.0 g of CO2. The grid in this region has a carbon intensity of 450 g CO2/kWh with 25% renewable energy.

How much water does GitHub Copilot use?

Each query consumes approximately 10 mL of water, primarily used for cooling the data centers that process the request.

How does GitHub Copilot compare to a Google search?

A GitHub Copilot query uses 5x more than a Google search in terms of energy. A Google search uses approximately 0.3 Wh, while GitHub Copilot uses 1.5 Wh.

Architecture

Transformer (GPT-4 class, decoder-only)

Release date

2022-06-21

Open source

No