OpenAI's Sam Altman Tells Us How Much Water Is Used When You Talk To ChatGPT
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OpenAI and other tech companies need resources like water and power to keep the AI systems running and ChatGPT answer your questions.
OpenAI and other AI giants like Google have people excited for the tech but there are concerns as to how much resources like water and electricity is needed to keep them running. ChatGPT is one of the popular chatbots in the market, and people have been wondering how much OpenAI needs to invest in hardware and other resources to make it faster and reliable.
Guess what, Sam Altman has come out publicly to share some stats around the use of ChatGPT and how much energy as well as water the AI chatbot needs to respond to your queries.
ChatGPT Needs Water And Energy But How Much?
Altman has penned down his belief in a recent blog post, giving us details that will tell us how AI is going to evolve and hopefully consume less resources in the near future. Altman claims that one query with ChatGPT needs around 0.34 watt-hours of power, which is as low as running a light bulb for a few minutes.
This might not sound like a lot for a single query but when you combine the billions of queries raised by the AI chatbot daily, you are looking at heavy usage of electricity.
He then makes a similar point about the use of water to generate responses from the AI systems. Altman mentions that you need a teaspoon of water to make ChatGPT answer one query, which again seems harmless but in the broader scheme of things, that is a lot of gallons being utilised. Having said that, none of these figures have been verified so we would like to take it with a pinch of salt.
In his defence, Altman cites the prospect of running AI coming down gradually like any other technology shift, but that is likely to happen in the long run, and concerns are that by then the taps might dry out for general use.
First Published:
June 12, 2025, 11:27 IST
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