By Nicholas Ames – Most people do not think twice when they type a question into ChatGPT. The response arrives in seconds, and that is that. But behind every one of those exchanges is a surprising amount of electricity, and as the platform approaches 900 million weekly active users, the numbers are getting very hard to ignore.

A closer look at the numbers reveals just how much power OpenAI’s ChatGPT uses to answer questions, and what that energy actually costs. The findings are jaw-dropping. Based on an estimated 3.2 billion user queries per day, ChatGPT consumes roughly 60.7 gigawatt-hours of electricity every single day. Over the course of a year, that adds up to more than 22 terawatt-hours, at an annual electricity cost of approximately $3.019 billion.

When you submit a query to ChatGPT, the process is called inference. The model passes your question through billions of parameters, identifies patterns, and generates a response. It sounds simple, but it is anything but efficient by traditional computing standards.

Researchers at the University of Rhode Island found that the current GPT-5 model, released in August 2025, consumes between 2 and 45 watt-hours per medium-length prompt, with an average of around 18.9 watt-hours. For comparison, a typical Google search uses about 0.3 watt-hours. That means a single ChatGPT response can consume over fifty times more energy than a conventional web search. As users increasingly turn to AI chatbots for information rather than traditional search engines, that gap has real consequences. Read On: