Everyday & curiosity
AI Energy Use Per Prompt
What does one prompt actually cost the grid? Pick a model class and your daily habit to see watt-hours, grams of CO2 and a year of usage in familiar units.
Per prompt
0.3 Wh
0.144 g CO2e per prompt
- Per day
- 12 Wh
- Per year
- 4.38 kWh
- Carbon per year
- 2.1 kg CO2e
- Grid intensity
- World average
In familiar units
- Google searches (0.3 Wh each)1 searches
- LED bulb (10 W) running1.8 minutes
- Phone charges (12 Wh)365 per year
- Driving a petrol car (170 g/km)12.4 km per year
Why the numbers vary so much
Published estimates for a single chat response range from roughly 0.05 to 3 watt-hours, because energy depends on model size, output length, batching, hardware generation and how full the data centre is. Image and video generation sit one to two orders of magnitude higher because they run many denoising passes per output.
This calculator uses midpoints of public estimates, so treat the result as an order of magnitude rather than a meter reading. The useful takeaway is relative: text prompts are roughly comparable to a few web searches, while a video clip is closer to running a laptop for an hour.