Qwen 3 235B Environmental Impact

Energy Consumption

Qwen 3 235B uses MoE with ~22B active parameters out of 235B total. Estimated at ~1.4 Wh per short query. When served via Alibaba Cloud, it runs on infrastructure comparable in efficiency to major US cloud providers. When self-hosted (it's open-source), energy depends entirely on the hardware.

Power Source & Carbon

Alibaba Cloud serves Qwen primarily from data centres in China, with a grid carbon intensity of approximately 550 gCO₂/kWh. As an open-source model, it can also be self-hosted globally.

Water Usage

Estimated at approximately 5.2 mL per query when served from Chinese data centres, reflecting both the energy requirements and regional cooling infrastructure.

How much energy does Qwen 3 235B use per query?

Each Qwen 3 235B query consumes approximately 1.4 Wh of energy. This is 5x more than a traditional Google search (~0.3 Wh).

What is Qwen 3 235B's carbon footprint?

Based on the carbon intensity of Alibaba Cloud (China / Global), each query produces approximately 0.77 g of CO2. The grid in this region has a carbon intensity of 550 g CO2/kWh with 30% renewable energy.

How much water does Qwen 3 235B use?

Each query consumes approximately 5 mL of water, primarily used for cooling the data centers that process the request.

How does Qwen 3 235B compare to a Google search?

A Qwen 3 235B query uses 5x more than a Google search in terms of energy. A Google search uses approximately 0.3 Wh, while Qwen 3 235B uses 1.4 Wh.

Architecture

Transformer Mixture-of-Experts (decoder-only)

Parameters

235B

Context window

128,000 tokens

Release date

2025-04-28

Open source

Yes

Training data cutoff

2025-03