How Much Energy Does ChatGPT Use? Should You Stop Saying "Thank You"?
Dr. Pippa follows one ChatGPT message to the data center, checks the published numbers, and asks whether saying "thank you" really costs millions.
In This Episode
What the Short Version Leaves Out
- "OpenAI says" means one blog post. The 0.34 watt-hour figure comes from a June 2025 post by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. It names no model and gives no method or scope. The light bulb comparison comes from the same post.
- The TV and water comparisons are Google's. Google reports that its 0.24 watt-hour Gemini prompt equals less than nine seconds of TV and uses about five drops of water. Our article works out about 12 seconds of TV for a 0.34 watt-hour prompt, using a 100-watt set.
- The older figure was not simply wrong. Much of the tenfold gap comes from different assumptions about tokens, chips and how busy the servers are, so the drop does not show that ChatGPT became ten times more efficient.
The full article shows the arithmetic and every reference.
Transcript
How much electricity does one message use?
How much electricity does one ChatGPT message use? About as much as a light bulb running for a couple of minutes. So should you stop saying thank you to ChatGPT? Let's follow one message and find out.
Where your message actually goes
Every time you say hello to an AI, your message goes on a little trip... all the way to a giant data center, where powerful computer chips wake up to answer you.
The official numbers (and the old estimate)
According to Google, a typical Gemini text prompt uses about 0.24 watt-hours. OpenAI says the average ChatGPT question uses about 0.34. That's like a light bulb on for a couple of minutes, a TV on for about nine seconds, and about five drops of water. You might have heard it's ten times more. But newer estimates say those old numbers were way too high.
Does saying "thank you" cost millions?
Wait, saying thank you costs MILLIONS?! OpenAI's CEO once joked that people saying please and thank you costs tens of millions of dollars. But that was a joke, not a real bill. One thank you is tiny.
The real story: scale
The real story is scale. Each message is tiny, but ChatGPT alone gets billions of messages every day. And long pastes and big tasks use even more.
3 ways to ask smart
So the real energy saver isn't skipping thank you... it's asking smart! Tip one: be clear the first time. Five vague retries means five times the work. Tip two: only paste what you need. Really long inputs can use several times more energy. Tip three: ask for the length you actually need. Smart prompts save time, and energy.
So can you still say thank you?
And yes... you can still say thank you!