OpenAI just announced the new GPT-5.2 model, its most advanced artificial intelligence model to date, which is said to enhance its general intelligence, coding, and long-context understanding. At the same time the company has made the surprising choice of appointing George Osbourne, former Conservative Party Chancellor, as its managing director (then again, Osbourne is not known for his green credentials).
More advanced AI models, however, come at a higher cost, with the electricity consumption of ChatGPT, in particular, ever growing. To put this into context, ChatGPT’s power needs for answering user questions alone have reached a massive 17 TWh a year, nearly what a country such as Puerto Rico or Slovenia uses to keep the lights on (ChatGPT’s energy use for processing requests surpasses the total electricity consumption of dozens of small countries and territories, including Slovenia, Georgia, Kenya, Lithuania, Costa Rica, Mongolia, Latvia, and Luxembourg).
The annual electricity needed to answer user queries would also be enough to power New York City for 113 days, or nearly 4 months, or the whole of the U.K. for 20 days. In addition, the data centres and their in-house power-hungry data servers consume additional energy, while generating a substantial carbon footprint.
As AI systems scale at breakneck speed, their energy appetite is ballooning just as quickly, straining power grids, pushing up carbon emissions, and raising uncomfortable questions about the environmental cost of intelligence on demand. ChatGPT is a prime example: each query is estimated to consume 18.9 watt-hours, more than 50 times the energy used by a standard Google search (0.3 Wh).
To illustrate the real scale of this, researchers at BestBrokers calculated the model’s total electricity consumption over a full year of responding to user prompts and calculated what it would (using the average U.S. commercial electricity rate of $0.141 per kWh as of September).
At the latest commercial electricity prices, that translates into an estimated $2.42 billion in annual power costs, solely to keep the model answering questions.
ChatGPT’s annual energy needed to answer user prompts (17.23 TWH) can supply electricity to these nations for:
- China: 15 hours
- U.S.: 1 day and 10 hours
- India: 3 days and 2 hours
- Russian Federation: 5 days and 6 hours
- Japan: 6 days and 4 hours
- Brazil: 8 days and 6 hours
- South Korea: 10 days and 1 hour
- Canada: 10 days and 2 hours
- Germany: 12 days and 9 hours
- France: 13 days and 11 hours
ChatGPT uses around 0.189 kWh per query, according to recent research by the University of Rhode Island’s AI lab. With 810 million active weekly users asking an average of 22 questions each week, it ends up consuming about 17.228 billion kWh annually. At the average U.S. commercial electricity rate as of September 2025, that adds up to a whopping $2.42 billion in energy costs.
Daily, this translates to more than 2.5 billion daily requests, consuming over half a 47.2 million kilowatt-hours of energy. With the average U.S. and Western European household consuming around 29 kWh per day, this means that the energy needed by ChatGPT every year could easily power all households in the U.S. for more than 4 and a half days.
For further context, the energy ChatGPT consumes in a year could fully charge about 238 million electric vehicles, each with an average battery capacity of 72.4 kWh. With an estimated 6.5 million EVs on U.S. roads as of mid-2025, the annual electricity for answering prompts could use all these vehicles at least 36 times.
