AI’s Power Demand: Calculating ChatGPT’s electricity consumption for handling 1.17 trillion user queries every year
Summary
Calculates ChatGPT's annual electricity consumption and cost for processing over a trillion queries, comparing energy usage to households, electric vehicles, and national power demands.
Key quotes
ChatGPT consumes 60.7GWh every day or more than 22TWh a year
ChatGPT’s yearly energy usage to handle prompts could power Brazil, which consumed 760.83 terra-watt-hours in 2024, for over 10 days.
The article estimates the energy requirements for GPT-5 and subsequent iterations, contrasting the power consumption of AI inference with traditional search engines. It also analyzes OpenAI’s potential subscription revenue relative to these energy costs.