Gemini 2.5 Flash Environmental Impact

Energy Consumption

Gemini 2.5 Flash is optimised for speed and cost, consuming approximately 0.35 Wh per median query. It supports adaptive thinking but defaults to minimal reasoning overhead for simple queries. At roughly 1.5x the base Gemini median (0.24 Wh), it's significantly more efficient than 2.5 Pro while still supporting chain-of-thought reasoning when needed.

Power Source & Carbon

Runs on Google's custom TPU infrastructure with 100% renewable energy matching and a PUE of 1.10.

Water Usage

At approximately 0.38 mL per query, Gemini 2.5 Flash has a very low water footprint.

How much energy does Gemini 2.5 Flash use per query?

Each Gemini 2.5 Flash query consumes approximately 0.35 Wh of energy. This is about the same as a traditional Google search (~0.3 Wh).

What is Gemini 2.5 Flash's carbon footprint?

Based on the carbon intensity of Google global network (64% renewable), each query produces approximately 0.05 g of CO2. The grid in this region has a carbon intensity of 300 g CO2/kWh with 64% renewable energy.

How much water does Gemini 2.5 Flash use?

Each query consumes approximately 0.38 mL of water, primarily used for cooling the data centers that process the request.

How does Gemini 2.5 Flash compare to a Google search?

A Gemini 2.5 Flash query uses about the same as a Google search in terms of energy. A Google search uses approximately 0.3 Wh, while Gemini 2.5 Flash uses 0.35 Wh.

Architecture

Multimodal Transformer (MoE, adaptive thinking)

Context window

1,000,000 tokens

Release date

2025-05-20

Open source

No

Training data cutoff

2025-03