The report circulated a comparison of roughly 2.9 Wh per ChatGPT request against 0.3 Wh per conventional search. Documents the historic basis of the tenfold assertion.[1]
Estimate based on older assumptions, not a contemporary matched measurement of all requests.
An updated analysis estimates a typical GPT-4o request near 0.3 Wh, substantially below the older 2.9 Wh figure. Challenges the fixed tenfold comparison.[2]
Modelled estimate; long-context and reasoning requests can use substantially more.
Google reports a median Gemini text-prompt energy measurement of 0.24 Wh with a stated production boundary. Demonstrates variation between deployments.[3]
[3] Measuring the environmental impact of AI inference | Google Cloud BlogCompany Report
Google Cloud · 21 Aug 2025
Gemini, not ChatGPT; vendor measurements and medians are not directly comparable to every search.
The source of the comparison: estimated about 3 Wh per ChatGPT request against about 0.3 Wh for a standard Google search.[4]
[4] The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligenceAcademic Paper
de Vries / Joule
An estimate built on 2023 hardware and outside assumptions, not a measurement.
OpenAI's chief executive states that an average ChatGPT query uses about 0.34 Wh, roughly the same as the long-quoted figure for a search.[5]
A company figure with no published method.