On June 17th, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently disclosed the specific energy consumption data for ChatGPT queries for the first time.
In his blog post, he revealed that a single ChatGPT query consumes an average of 0.34 watt-hours (0.00034 kilowatt-hours) and uses approximately 0.000085 gallons of water - equivalent to the electricity consumption of an energy-saving light bulb operating for two minutes, or about 1/15 of a teaspoon of water.
As a leading enterprise in the artificial intelligence industry, OpenAI's public disclosure of energy consumption data is of symbolic significance, providing important reference for assessing the environmental impact of AI technology and sparking heated discussion in the industry. This article will analyze this data and present different perspectives.
Is the 0.34 watt-hours data credible?
The main basis supporting this data comes from the mutual verification of third-party research:
1) Consistent Independent Research Data
The credibility of this data is first reflected in its high consistency with third-party research. The renowned research institution Epoch.AI reported in 2025 that the energy consumption of a single GPT-4o query is about 0.0003 kilowatt-hours, which is basically consistent with the data published by OpenAI.
Epoch.AI's calculation is based on the following assumptions: OpenAI models use a "mixture of experts" architecture with 100 billion active parameters, with a typical response output of 500 tokens. However, the research has two limitations: first, it only calculated the direct energy consumption of GPU servers, and second, it did not incorporate the PUE energy efficiency assessment indicators common to data centers.
Also in 2025, an academic team led by Nidhal Jegham produced more detailed data: GPT-4.1 nano single query energy consumption is 0.000454 kilowatt-hours, the inference model o3 power consumption increased to 0.0039 kilowatt-hours, while the GPT-4.5 energy consumption for processing long text tasks (about 7000 words input + 1000 words output) reached 0.03 kilowatt-hours.
The convergence of data from multiple independent studies indicates that the energy consumption value published by OpenAI is at least within a reasonable range during the model inference stage.
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