Gemini 2.5 Pro Environmental Impact

Energy Consumption

Gemini 2.5 Pro is a reasoning model that uses adaptive thinking — extended chain-of-thought processing before responding. This makes it significantly more energy-intensive than standard Gemini models. We estimate approximately 0.9 Wh per medium query — roughly 4x the median Gemini text prompt (0.24 Wh) — based on its reasoning overhead and longer output generation. Google's 33x efficiency improvement applies to the base Gemini family; reasoning adds additional compute on top.

Power Source & Carbon

Runs on Google's custom TPU v5e/v6e chips across its global data centre network. Google claims 100% renewable energy matching and a PUE of 1.10. Market-based carbon intensity is approximately 130 gCO₂/kWh.

Water Usage

At approximately 0.97 mL per query, Gemini 2.5 Pro benefits from Google's efficient cooling infrastructure. Google's site WUE is approximately 1.08 L/kWh.

How much energy does Gemini 2.5 Pro use per query?

Each Gemini 2.5 Pro query consumes approximately 0.90 Wh of energy. This is 3x more than a traditional Google search (~0.3 Wh).

What is Gemini 2.5 Pro's carbon footprint?

Based on the carbon intensity of Google global network (64% renewable), each query produces approximately 0.12 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 Pro use?

Each query consumes approximately 0.97 mL of water, primarily used for cooling the data centers that process the request.

How does Gemini 2.5 Pro compare to a Google search?

A Gemini 2.5 Pro query uses 3x more than a Google search in terms of energy. A Google search uses approximately 0.3 Wh, while Gemini 2.5 Pro uses 0.90 Wh.

Architecture

Multimodal Transformer (MoE, reasoning)

Context window

1,000,000 tokens

Release date

2025-03-25

Open source

No

Training data cutoff

2025-01