Understanding How Much Energy Agentic AI Actually Uses

As a climate scientist, Zeke Hausfather uses artificial intelligence (AI) every day for research and data analysis. But he kept wondering how much energy all that AI use was consuming. So, over eight weeks this summer, he tracked the 1,138 prompts he typed into Claude Code and estimated how much electricity they consumed at data centers.

Tech companies have shared little data about the energy use of their AI models. One of the few public estimates comes from Google, which said last year that a typical text prompt on Gemini used just 0.24 watt-hours, less than watching TV for nine seconds. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, has said a ChatGPT query uses a similar amount, around 0.34 watt-hours. But Hausfather suspected those figures no longer reflected how people are actually using AI.

“In the AI world, a year is an eternity,” Hausfather said.

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