This is how much electricity and water a single email uses

The ever-advancing digitalization is also driving up electricity and water consumption. But how high is the consumption actually if you let ChatGPT write an email for you, for example? Researchers in the USA have looked into this question.

The topic of artificial intelligence has literally gone through the roof with the introduction of ChatGPT. In Germany alone, just one year after the launch of the AI ​​system from OpenAI, 78 percent of Germans have already heard or read something about it.

But the ever-increasing implementation of artificial intelligence in our everyday lives also generates enormous electricity and water consumption. Researchers from the University of California at Riverside and the Washington Post analyzed them together.

How much electricity and water does ChatGPT use?

A quick translation at DeepL or a question to ChatGPT – AI has already found its way into many areas of our daily lives. But the more often these systems are used or trained, the greater the performance that the data centers behind them require.

The US team from the University of California and the Washington Post has now looked at how much water and electricity ChatGPT actually needs. The researchers use an email with 100 words that ChatGPT creates with GPT4 as the unit of measurement for their calculation.

One email or 14 LEDs

An email with 100 words accepted by the researchers and written using ChatGPT with GPT4 requires 0.14 kilowatt hours. That's as much electricity as 14 LEDs use in one hour.

If a person had ChatGPT write an email of this size every week, they would consume 7.5 kilowatt hours of electricity in a year. According to the researchers, this is as much electricity as 9.3 households in the US capital Washington DC need in one hour.

Extrapolated to ten percent of the US workforce, such weekly email would consume 121,517 megawatt hours. This means that the 16 million people with their ChatGPT emails would consume the same amount of electricity as all households in Washington DC in 20 days.

How much water does an email from ChatGPT use?

But the fictitious email from ChatGPT would not only have an enormous impact on power consumption. Water consumption would also increase because the servers in the data centers have to be cooled with water.

According to the researchers' calculations, the email with 100 words uses 518 milliliters of water. So for a year – with one email per week – this would amount to 27 liters.

For ten percent of the workforce per year, the researchers estimate a water volume of 435,235,476 liters. That's as much as all households in the US state of Rhode Island use in a day and a half.

Despite these calculations, the environmental impact caused by AI is “almost impossible to quantify,” according to the team of researchers. This is due, among other things, to the fact that the consumption of electricity and water varies greatly depending on the location of the data center. In areas where there is not enough water for cooling, this is done elsewhere – for example with Storm.

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