English: What’s the energy footprint of individual LLM queries?

I know many people who are conscious of their own use of large language models (LLMs) and AI tools for environmental reasons. Some abstain or use them as little as possible. Others continue to do so, but feel guilty for it.

How much energy do our individual queries consume? If someone asks an LLM — like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude — a question, how much additional electricity demand do they generate?

Again, accurate and up-to-date figures on this are hard to find because most technology companies have not released detailed analyses of the energy consumption of their models.

One of the first companies to do so was Google; in 2025, it released energy estimates for its Gemini model. It estimated the median text-based query (basically asking Gemini a text question) consumed around 0.24 watt-hours (Wh) of electricity. For context, that’s the amount of energy a microwave would consume in less than one second, or a television for ten seconds.

The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, also previously wrote that an “average query” on ChatGPT consumed around 0.34 Wh (but without a detailed breakdown of where this number comes from). Epoch AI also provided its own independent estimate of around 0.3 Wh for a “typical” ChatGPT query.

So a number of sources tend to converge on a similar figure. However, most queries are simple, so the median query is probably small in both size and complexity.

For longer queries or requests that rely on AI agents or reasoning, the footprint is higher. Epoch AI estimated that a long query (7,500 words of input) could consume about 2.5 Wh, and a very long one (75,000 words) could consume 40 Wh. Those are far higher than the simple text query.

There are fewer estimates for other types of requests. In its 2026 report, the IEA provides estimates of GPU electricity consumption for agentic tasks with reasoning.7 A standard request to an AI agent — such as Claude — is estimated to consume around 1.1 Wh. An agentic request with reasoning, around 50 Wh. This is similar to the estimates for maximum-length text queries.

However, all of these are still relatively small compared to the average person’s daily electricity consumption, especially in high-income countries.

In the European Union, average electricity consumption per person is around 17,000 Wh per day.8 That’s equivalent to around 6,800 long-input queries (which consume 2.5 Wh each). Or 425 of the maximum-input queries.

The average person in the US consumes approximately twice as much electricity as the EU average, so the contribution of AI queries to someone’s footprint there is about half the size.9

In the chart below, I’ve provided some comparisons to give a sense of how this energy consumption compares to other products or activities.10