GPT-4.1 Nano Environmental Impact

Energy Consumption

GPT-4.1 Nano is OpenAI's most efficient model, consuming just 0.27 Wh per query — comparable to a single Google search. Its small parameter count means fewer GPU computations per token, making it suitable for lightweight tasks where full GPT-4o power is unnecessary.

Power Source & Carbon

Runs on the same Microsoft Azure infrastructure as other OpenAI models (US East Virginia and Sweden Central). While the model itself is efficient, the grid carbon intensity at the Virginia data center hub remains high at ~450 g CO2/kWh.

Water Usage

Due to its low energy draw, GPT-4.1 Nano uses approximately 1.5 mL of water per query — far less than larger models. The cooling requirements scale roughly with energy consumption.

How much energy does GPT-4.1 Nano use per query?

Each GPT-4.1 Nano query consumes approximately 0.27 Wh of energy. This is about the same as a traditional Google search (~0.3 Wh).

What is GPT-4.1 Nano's carbon footprint?

Based on the carbon intensity of Azure US East / Sweden, each query produces approximately 0.12 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 GPT-4.1 Nano use?

Each query consumes approximately 2 mL of water, primarily used for cooling the data centers that process the request.

How does GPT-4.1 Nano compare to a Google search?

A GPT-4.1 Nano query uses about the same as a Google search in terms of energy. A Google search uses approximately 0.3 Wh, while GPT-4.1 Nano uses 0.27 Wh.

Architecture

Dense Transformer (decoder-only)

Context window

1,047,576 tokens

Release date

2025-04-14

Open source

No

Training data cutoff

2025-03