AI energy use is a huge and controversial topic at the moment. Credible estimates have AI data centers accounting for around 12% US electricity use by 2030. But at the same time consumers have been given reassuringly small numbers about the impact of their own AI use, numbers that seem on their face somewhat inconsistent with the staggering size of their aggregate usage. In 2025 Google published an article calculating that median Gemini text prompt used only 0.24 watt-hours (Wh), less energy than “watching nine seconds of television”. Around the same time, Sam Altman said that an average ChatGPT query uses about 0.34 Wh, and Epoch AI came out with similar numbers. Writers like Andy Masley and Hannah Ritchie have shown that at these rates an individual using chatbots has a pretty negligible impact, with one prompt only amounting to roughly 1/150,000th of an average American’s daily emissions.

Full report : Agentic AI uses about 600x more energy than simple AI prompts.