audio

ElevenLabs Environmental Impact

Q: What is ElevenLabs's carbon footprint?

Based on the carbon intensity of its inference location (Cloud (US / EU)), each ElevenLabs query produces approximately 0.65g of CO2.

Q: How does ElevenLabs compare to a Google search?

A ElevenLabs query uses 5x more than a traditional Google search in terms of energy consumption. A Google search uses approximately 0.3 Wh, while ElevenLabs uses 1.5 Wh per query.

Q: How much water does ElevenLabs use?

Each ElevenLabs query consumes approximately 5.5 mL of water, primarily used for cooling the data centers that process the request.

StandardEstimated

Dominant voice AI platform for cloning, dubbing, and synthesis

Architecture: Neural voice synthesis (proprietary)
Provider: ElevenLabs

1.5 Wh

Energy per query

0.65 g

CO₂ per query

6 mL

Water per query

5x more than

vs Google search

Energy per query

1.5 Wh

5x more than a Google search (0.3 Wh)

CO2 per query

0.65 g

US East (Virginia) grid (450 gCO₂/kWh)

Water per query

6 mL

~182 queries to fill 1 litre

Processing location

Cloud (US / EU)

Provider

ElevenLabs

How does ElevenLabs compare?

Ranked #77 of 152 models by energy per query

View full comparison

Detailed Breakdown

Energy Consumption

ElevenLabs is the dominant voice synthesis platform, offering voice cloning, multilingual dubbing, and high-fidelity speech generation. At ~1.5 Wh per minute of audio, it's more energy-intensive than OpenAI TTS due to its higher-fidelity multi-speaker voice modelling and real-time streaming capabilities.

ElevenLabs — About

Power Source & Carbon

ElevenLabs runs on US and EU cloud infrastructure. No environmental disclosures have been published.

ElevenLabs — About

Water Usage

At ~5.5 mL per minute of generated speech. Professional dubbing workflows generating hours of audio can accumulate significant water usage.

UC Riverside — Making AI Less Thirsty (2023)

About ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is a audio model from ElevenLabs, released in January 30, 2023. Dominant voice AI platform for cloning, dubbing, and synthesis. Each query uses 1.5 Wh of energy and produces 0.65 g of CO₂. That's 5x the energy of a Google search — reflecting the computational demands of audio.

These figures are estimates derived from hardware specifications and API benchmarks — ElevenLabs has not published official energy data for ElevenLabs. Actual consumption may vary significantly depending on batching, quantisation, and infrastructure optimisations that we cannot observe from outside.

ElevenLabs in Context

13.7 kWh

per year

Your yearly ElevenLabs footprint

At 25 queries per day, your annual ElevenLabs usage consumes 13.7 kWh — roughly what a fridge uses in a month. That produces 5.9 kg of CO₂.

What does your ElevenLabs usage cost the planet?

Use our calculator to estimate your personal environmental footprint based on how often you use ElevenLabs.

Calculate My Compute

Frequently Asked Questions

How much energy does ElevenLabs use per query?

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

What is ElevenLabs's carbon footprint?

Based on the carbon intensity of Cloud (US / EU), each query produces approximately 0.65 g of CO2. The grid in this region has a carbon intensity of 450 g CO2/kWh with 25% renewable energy.