The answer may alarm you. The answer is about equivalent of a full bottle of water and enough power to light up 14 LED bulbs for one hour, according t

The Environmental Toll of a Single ChatGPT Query Is Absolutely Wild

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2024-09-24 07:00:07

The answer may alarm you. The answer is about equivalent of a full bottle of water and enough power to light up 14 LED bulbs for one hour, according to The Washington Post's consultation with UC Riverside researcher Shaolei Ren — an appreciable environmental toll on its own, but a staggering one when you multiply it out to the number of users worldwide.

Say one out of every ten working Americans were using ChatGPT just once a week to write an email. In Ren's estimate, over a one year period that would mean ChatGPT would guzzle 435 million liters of water and burn 121,517 megawatt-hours of power, which translates into all the water drunk up by every household in Rhode Island for a day and a half and enough electricity to light up all the households in Washington DC for 20 days.

And that's just today's usage. With big tech so confident in the explosive potential of AI that Microsoft is looking to bring an entire nuclear plant back online to fuel its AI datacenters, those figures could come to look laughably low.