The Environmental Toll of a Single ChatGPT Query Is Absolutely Wild

The answers are going to shock you.

Aqua Cola

Just how much resources are eaten up when you ask OpenAI's ChatGPT to write a simple 100-word email?

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.

Thirst Traps

The reason ChatGPT consumes so much water is due to the fact that AI data centers emit tons of heat when running calculations. In order to cool these facilities, they require a tremendous amount of water to bring down the temperatures coming from these servers. In places where electricity is cheap or where there's water scarcity, AI data centers use electricity to run air conditioners to cool their servers.

That can be a burden on infrastructure. Places like Arizona and Iowa are already feeling the tension between serving the needs of the public and the insatiable water thirst and power hunger of AI data centers, which bring tax revenue and jobs to these locales.

But something has got to give, especially as big tech companies like Google and Microsoft, a close business partner of OpenAI, report that they're using more resources than ever despite pledges to carbon neutrality. In the long run, who's going to win in this competition: AI or environment?

More on AI and the environment: Microsoft Secretly Selling AI to Fossil Fuel Companies While Bragging About Environmental Progress