this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 1 day ago by homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The University of Rhode Island's AI lab estimates that GPT-5 averages just over 18 Wh per query, so putting all of ChatGPT's reported 2.5 billion requests a day through the model could see energy usage as high as 45 GWh.

A daily energy use of 45 GWh is enormous. A typical modern nuclear power plant produces between 1 and 1.6 GW of electricity per reactor per hour, so data centers running OpenAI's GPT-5 at 18 Wh per query could require the power equivalent of two to three nuclear power reactors, an amount that could be enough to power a small country.

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[–] dan@upvote.au 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

that make it sound bad and unprofitable

It is unprofitable, though.

OpenAI recently hit $10 billion in ARR and are likely to hit $12.7b by the end of the year, but they're still losing a lot of money. They don't think they'll make a profit until 2029, and only if they hit their target of $125 billion revenue. That's a huge amount of growth - 10x in 4 years - so I'm interested as to if they'll actually hit it.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago

Okay, make it sound worse and even more unprofitable.

Making their AI models cheaper to run (such as by requiring less electricity) is one step along that path to profitability.