“People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses,” Sam AltmanThe CEO is. OpenAIIn an aside, a writer wrote: long blog post Last week. Altman’s article states that an average search uses 0.34 Watt-hours. “About what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes.”
If you are a business with over 800,000,000 active weekly users, then this is a good fit for your company. growingThe question about how much energy is being used by all of these searches has become more pressing. But experts say Altman’s figure doesn’t mean much without much more public context from OpenAI about how it arrived at this calculation—including the definition of what an “average” Altman will need to know if it includes energy consumption from OpenAI’s servers, for example, when training AI models.
Sasha Luccioni (climate lead, Hugging Face) doesn’t give much credence to Altman’s figure. “He could have pulled that out of his ass,” “She says.” OpenAI didn’t respond to my request for further information as to how they arrived at the number.
AI promises to revolutionize our energy systems and boost carbon emissions at the same time we fight climate change. New and increasing research is now attempting to determine how much CO2 we are actually emitting from our AI usage.
OpenAi and other major AI players are not transparent enough about their environmental practices, complicating this effort. Luccioni, along with three other authors, submitted an analysis for peer review last week that examines the need for greater environmental transparency when developing AI models. Luccioni, along with her co-authors, used data from OpenRouterIn May 2025, the use of LLMs was 84 percent for models that did not disclose any environmental information. This means consumers choose models with unknown environmental effects.
“It blows my mind that you can buy a car and know how many miles per gallon it consumes, yet we use all these AI tools every day and we have absolutely no efficiency metrics, emissions factors, nothing,” Luccioni says. “It’s not mandated, it’s not regulatory. Given where we are with the climate crisis, it should be top of the agenda for regulators everywhere.”
Luccioni says that due to this lack transparency, estimates are given out which make no sense, but they’re taken for gospel. For example, you may have heard that the average ChatGPT requests takes up 10 times more energy than the average Google Search. Luccioni & her co-workers traced this claim all the way back to a comment made by John Hennessy in 2023, Alphabet’s chairman.
A claim made by a board member from one company (Google) about the product of another company to which he has no relation (OpenAI) is tenuous at best—yet, Luccioni’s analysis finds, this figure has been repeated again and again in press and policy reports. As I wrote this article, I received a pitch that included this exact stat.
