Do you know how much water each AI chat prompt consumes?

Google’s Gemini, a prominent artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, consumes as much energy to answer a text prompt as nine seconds of watching television and uses approximately five drops of water for cooling, according to a technical research paper published last week.

In a Google Cloud blog post titled “How much energy does Google’s AI use? We did the math,” the company presented a comprehensive analysis of the environmental impact of AI.

This research highlighted the environmental footprint of Gemini, showing that its energy consumption, carbon emissions, and water usage were significantly lower than previous estimates, Anadolu reports.

On average, a single text prompt into Gemini consumes 0.24 watt-hours of energy, emits 0.03 grams of carbon, and results in 0.26 millilitres of water consumption.

Efficiency improvements and reduced impact

Google engineers explained that Gemini’s environmental footprint is much smaller than previously thought. The energy consumption per prompt has decreased by 33 times, and its carbon emissions have fallen by 44 times.

Key advancements, such as model improvements and software optimisations over the past year, resulted in 23 times energy savings. Additionally, better resource utilisation and clean energy initiatives led to a 1.4 times reduction in carbon emissions.

The paper pointed out that earlier studies often overestimated environmental impacts due to their narrow scope. Most of these studies only considered the active energy consumption of AI processors. In contrast, Google’s research includes idle machine energy use, processor and memory power draws, and data centre cooling systems.

The report further revealed that the average water consumption associated with a Gemini chat was hundreds of times lower than earlier predictions, which estimated consumption at 45 to 50 millilitres per interaction. The new measurement showed only 0.26 millilitres of water per text prompt, a stark reduction.