The New Yorker: ChatGPT may consume more than 500,000 kWh of electricity per day

According to The New Yorker, OpenAI's popular chatbot ChatGPT may consume more than 500,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per day to respond to approximately 200 million requests from users. In comparison, the average American household uses about 29 kilowatt-hours of electricity per day. Dividing ChatGPT's daily electricity consumption by the average household's electricity consumption, it can be found that ChatGPT's daily electricity consumption is more than 17,000 times that of a household.

That sounds like a lot, but if generative AI is further adopted, the power consumption could be even more.

For example, if Google incorporated generative A techniques into every search, it would consume about 29 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, according to calculations by Alex de Vries, a data scientist at the Dutch National Bank, in a paper published in the sustainable energy journal Joule. That’s more electricity than countries like Kenya, Guatemala, and Croatia use in a year, The New Yorker reported.

“AI is very energy-intensive,” de Vries said. “Each AI server already uses as much electricity as a dozen UK homes combined. So these numbers can add up very quickly.”

However, estimating how much electricity the booming AI industry consumes is difficult to determine. According to The Verge, there is considerable variation in how large AI models are run, and the big tech companies driving the AI ​​boom are not fully transparent about their energy usage.

However, in his paper, de Vries presents a rough calculation based on figures published by Nvidia, a chipmaker that controls about 95% of the graphics processor market.

In his paper, De Vries estimates that by 2027, the entire AI industry will consume 85 to 134 terawatt hours per year (1 terawatt hour is equivalent to 1 billion kilowatt hours).

“By 2027, AI could account for half a percent of global electricity use,” de Vries said. “I think that’s a pretty significant number.”

From Global Market Report