It's so important to differentiate between commercial LLMs and AI as a general concept.
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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OP, this statement is bullshit. you can do about 5 million requests for ONE flight.
i'm gonna quote my old post:
I had the discussion regarding generated CO2 a while ago here, and with the numbers my discussion partner gave me, the calculation said that the yearly usage of ChatGPT is appr. 0.0017% of our CO2 reduction during the covid lockdowns - chatbots are not what is kiling the climate. What IS killing the climate has not changed since the green movement started: cars, planes, construction (mainly concrete production) and meat.
The exact energy costs are not published, but 3Wh / request for ChatGPT-4 is the upper limit from what we know (and thats in line with the appr. power consumption on my graphics card when running an LLM). Since Google uses it for every search, they will probably have optimized for their use case, and some sources cite 0.3Wh/request for chatbots - it depends on what model you use. The training is a one-time cost, and for ChatGPT-4 it raises the maximum cost/request to 4Wh. That's nothing. The combined worldwide energy usage of ChatGPT is equivalent to about 20k American households. This is for one of the most downloaded apps on iPhone and Android - setting this in comparison with the massive usage makes clear that saving here is not effective for anyone interested in reducing climate impact, or you have to start scolding everyone who runs their microwave 10 seconds too long.
Even compared to other online activities that use data centers ChatGPT's power usage is small change. If you use ChatGPT instead of watching Netflix you actually safe energy!
Water is about the same, although the positioning of data centers in the US sucks. The used water doesn't disappear tho - it's mostly returned to the rivers or is evaporated. The water usage in the US is 58,000,000,000,000 gallons (220 Trillion Liters) of water per year. A ChatGPT request uses between 10-25ml of water for cooling. A Hamburger uses about 600 galleons of water. 2 Trillion Liters are lost due to aging infrastructure . If you want to reduce water usage, go vegan or fix water pipes.
Read up here !
If you want to look at it another way, if you assume every single square inch of silicon from TSMC is Nvidia server accelerators/AMD EPYCs, every single one running AI at full tilt 24/7/365...
Added up, it's not that much power, or water.
That's unrealistic, of course, but that's literally the physical cap of what humanity can produce at the moment.
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But remember, one almond uses at least as much water as two requests to ChatGPT (sources: almonds, queries, data centers), so if you're eating almonds at all then you're being inconsistent.
I appreciate you sharing sources for that. I know almond use a lot of water. But one of the things you mentioned is food, and the other is a liar.
that's very pragmatic, but you can also flip this around -- almonds are a luxury compared to other more practical foods, whereas LLMs can help a coder net an income if used properly. I don't think you can justify almonds if you're going to claim AI usage is unethical on purely environmental grounds. And dairy milk is twice as much as almond milk in terms of water, so if you have dairy in your diet, cutting that out is going to be a lot more effective for reducing your water footprint than not using LLMs.
Anyway, check out the third link for more info on the total water usage of data centers; it doesn't really add up to much compared to much larger things like golf courses. I don't get why anyone would use water usage as a reason to agitate against AI for given that there are so many worse problems AI is causing.
almonds have value, while data centers dont generate profit.
Yeah, AI is shit and a massive waste of energy, but it's NOTHING compared to the energy usage of the airline industry.
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From this page it turns out that every prompt is one glass of water. Is there any chance we run out of water at this point ?
There have been reports of AI data centers further draining water reserves in areas of non abundant nor sufficiently recovering water. Which has not only environment but social and human consequences in the area.
Your article doesn’t even claim that. Do you have any idea just how carbon intensive a flight is?
300,000 liters of jet fuel to send one 747 across the Atlantic Ocean - one time.
I imagine people making that claim accept air travel as useful and "AI", really, all datacenters as not useful. I've had people tell me oh, air travel is more efficient per mile that road travel. But this ignores that people wouldn't drive thousands of miles if it was not as easy as booking a flight.
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idk if that's the intended takeaway from those numbers.
According to AllAboutAI analysis, global AI processing generates over 260,930 kilograms of CO₂ monthly from ChatGPT alone, equivalent to 260 transatlantic flights, with 1 billion daily queries consuming 300 MWh of electricity.
according to the faa there are on average 5500 planes in the air every day, and while i couldn't find an exact number there seem to be between 350 and 1 200 transatlantic flights every day, depending on season.
260 tons is still massive, but let's not kid ourselves. it's about equivalent to producing 12 new american-size cars.
Just goes to show that you don't even need AI to spread misinformation! Haha
Thank you.
Idk if LLMs can tell which number is bigger. But we already knew humans can't.
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I did some research and according to some AI's this is true. According to some other AI's this is false.
The statement strikes me as overblown extreme position staking.
I use AI in my work, not every day, not even every week, but once in a while I'll run 20-30 queries in a multi-hour session. At the estimated 2Wh per query, that puts my long day of AI code work at 60Wh.
By comparison, driving an electric car consumes approximately 250Wh per mile. So... my evil day spent coding with AI has burned as much energy as a 1/4 mile of driving a relatively efficient car, something that happens every 15 seconds while cruising down the highway...
In other words, my conscience is clear about my personal AI energy usage, and my $20/month subscription fee would seem to amply pay for all the power consumed and then some.
Now, if you want to talk about the massive data mining operations taking place at global-multinational corporations, especially those trolling the internet to build population profiles for their own advantages and profit... that's a very different scale than one person tapping away at a keyboard. Do they scale up to the same energy usage as the 12 million gallons of jet fuel burned hourly by the air travel (and cargo) industries? Probably not yet.
9.6kWh of energy in a gallon of jet fuel, so just jet fuel consumption is burning over 115 Gigawatts on average, 24-7-365.
I hope you recycle as well!
I hope your recycling is net carbon neutral as well. Example: how much CO2 is released by a recycling program which sends big diesel trucks all over the city to collect recyclables including cardboard, sorting that cardboard at a facility, shipping a small fraction of that to a pulp recycling facility and making recycled cardboard from the post-consumer captured pulp? Consider the alternative to be: torching the cardboard at the endpoint of use - direct conversion to CO2 without the additional steps.
Don't forget: new from pulpwood cardboard also is contributing to (temporary) carbon capture by growing the pulpwood trees which also provides groundwater recharge and wildlife habitat on the pulpwood tree farms - instead of the pavement, concrete, steel, electricity and fuel consumption of the recycling process.
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Which is why I threw up in my mouth a little when my boss said we all need to be more bullish on AI this morning.
Same. And they basically jizz their pants when they see a practical use for AI, but 9 out of 10 times there's already a cheaper and more reliable solution they won't even entertain.
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My boss is also a fuckwit
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Barely ever used it just for that reason and the fact that the algorithms are getting worse by the day. But now my work is forcing us to use it. To increase productivity you see...
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