audio

Whisper Environmental Impact

Q: How much energy does Whisper use per query?

Each Whisper query consumes approximately 0.5 Wh of energy. This is 2x more than a traditional Google search (~0.3 Wh).

Q: What is Whisper's carbon footprint?

Based on the carbon intensity of its inference location (Self-hosted (varies) / Azure), each Whisper query produces approximately 0.22g of CO2.

Q: How does Whisper compare to a Google search?

A Whisper query uses 2x more than a traditional Google search in terms of energy consumption. A Google search uses approximately 0.3 Wh, while Whisper uses 0.5 Wh per query.

Q: How much water does Whisper use?

Each Whisper query consumes approximately 1.8 mL of water, primarily used for cooling the data centers that process the request.

StandardEstimated

OpenAI's open-source speech-to-text model

Architecture: Encoder-decoder Transformer (audio)
Parameters: 1.55B
Provider: OpenAI

0.50 Wh

Energy per query

0.22 g

CO₂ per query

2 mL

Water per query

2x more than

vs Google search

Energy per query

0.50 Wh

2x more than a Google search (0.3 Wh)

CO2 per query

0.22 g

Global Average grid (475 gCO₂/kWh)

Water per query

2 mL

~556 queries to fill 1 litre

Processing location

Self-hosted (varies) / Azure

Provider

OpenAI

How does Whisper compare?

Ranked #35 of 152 models by energy per query

View full comparison

Detailed Breakdown

Energy Consumption

Whisper consumes approximately 0.5 Wh per minute of audio transcription. The largest model (1.55B parameters) is accurate but energy-intensive; the smaller 'tiny' (39M) and 'base' (74M) variants use a fraction of the energy at ~0.03-0.05 Wh/min. Whisper can run on consumer GPUs or even CPUs, making it one of the most widely deployed open-source AI models.

OpenAI — Introducing Whisper (Sep 2022)arXiv — Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision (2022)

Power Source & Carbon

Fully open-source (MIT licence). Widely self-hosted on consumer hardware, cloud GPUs, and edge devices. When used via the OpenAI API, runs on Azure infrastructure.

GitHub — openai/whisper

Water Usage

At ~1.8 mL per minute of transcription (large model, cloud-hosted). Self-hosted on consumer hardware, water usage is zero.

Built In — How edge computing can solve AI's energy crisis

About Whisper

Whisper is an open-source audio model from OpenAI, released in September 21, 2022, that runs well below the category average for energy consumption at 0.50 Wh per query. Because its weights are publicly available, it can be self-hosted on any infrastructure — meaning its carbon footprint depends entirely on where and how you choose to run it. At 1.55B parameters, it openai's open-source speech-to-text model.

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

Whisper in Context

4.6 kWh

per year

Your yearly Whisper footprint

At 25 queries per day, your annual Whisper usage consumes 4.6 kWh — comparable to running a LED light bulb for a month. That produces 2.0 kg of CO₂.

Key Insights

Uses less than a third of the average energy for audio models

Open-source weights — can be self-hosted on infrastructure you control

What does your Whisper usage cost the planet?

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

Calculate My Compute

Frequently Asked Questions

How much energy does Whisper use per query?

Each Whisper query consumes approximately 0.50 Wh of energy. This is 2x more than a traditional Google search (~0.3 Wh).

What is Whisper's carbon footprint?

Based on the carbon intensity of Self-hosted (varies) / Azure, each query produces approximately 0.22 g of CO2. The grid in this region has a carbon intensity of 475 g CO2/kWh with 27% renewable energy.