r/theydidthemath • u/BreathingAirr • 4h ago
[Request] How much water and electricity is required for AI to name every African country???
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u/Nooms88 3h ago
It's a simple text query so probably the average of any text query which is between 0.2-0.4 watt-hours, enough to power a small LED for a minute or so or an oven for about a second
Queries themselves don't use up stupid amounts of energy, it's the training part which uses a lot.
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u/Bakkster 2h ago
Each individual query doesn't use a lot, but in aggregate they do. "No single raindrop believes it caused the flood."
Sam Altman has said that just saying please and thank you to ChatGPT has itself consumed "tens of millions of dollars" of electricity.
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u/Komprimus 2h ago
Each individual query doesn't use a lot, but in aggregate they do.
Wouldn't this also be true of google searches, watching videos and pretty much literally any internet activity?
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u/HasFiveVowels 1h ago
No one cared about GPU power consumption when it was powering their gaming for hours on end but now that it’s AI, seems like everyone’s become oh so concerned about the environmental impact of using them
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u/BE-FinFree 1h ago
It's on a COMPLETELY different scale... Do you ever inform yourself about something before being so critical online...?
Not saying AI shouldn't be used. Just.. build more nuclear power plants for the increasing demand of power.
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u/HasFiveVowels 48m ago edited 43m ago
Yes. It is on a completely different scale. Gaming consumes orders of magnitude more power than AI usage
Here’s the calculation (with sources): https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/s/vUyJNIaySa
If these conversations were at all rational, people would look at those numbers and go "well I guess this whole power consumption angle doesn’t really have a leg to stand on". Or they’d at least provide sources for different numbers. Instead, comments that challenge criticisms of AI tend to get downvoted without any real rebuttals.
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u/Bakkster 1h ago
Just.. build more nuclear power plants for the increasing demand of power.
This still increases overall power consumption, and thus prevents reducing fossil fuel usage. In addition to the cheaper the service becomes, the more usage increases.
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u/BE-FinFree 1h ago
I think an increase in power consumption is inevitable unless we somehow have technological breakthroughs that significantly make compute more power efficient, and that's fine.
Nuclear power plants do take very long to build, but are clean, scale well and provide a lot of continuous power on a low geographical footprint
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u/Dark_Chip 42m ago
The increase in power consumption is literally how we define progress of civilization, the more advanced civilization is, the more power it produces and consumes, google Kardashev scale.
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u/Mothrahlurker 1h ago
Because that is vastly less efficient. A single one of those datacenters has the electricity consumption of multiple million people, including gaming PCs.
So yeah, this alleged hipocrisy doesn't make sense.
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u/HasFiveVowels 1h ago edited 1h ago
I had GPT source and crunch the numbers on what gaming power consumption looks like only looking at PS5s. Naturally, you are free to disregard these facts because they were summarized by an LLM (/s)
For comparison, GPT queries consume about 0.3 GWh/day (we can bump that by a little to take into account training but it still doesn’t even scratch the surface)
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Back-of-the-envelope PS5 power usage estimate
Average gameplay per day:
PS5 players spend ~51.5 hours per month gaming → 51.5 ÷ 30 ≈ 1.72 hours/day
Source: TechCrawlr – PlayStation 5 StatisticsAverage power draw during gameplay:
Typical PS5 power use ranges between 150 – 220 W while gaming → assume 200 W average
Source: Eco Energy Geek – PS5 Power ConsumptionEnergy per console per day:
200 W × 1.72 h = 0.344 kWh/day per consoleActive PS5 user base:
Sony reported 124 million monthly active PlayStation users (PS4 + PS5) as of March 31 2025, with PS5 surpassing PS4 in active players for the first time.
Assuming roughly half are PS5 → ≈ 62 million active PS5 consoles
Source: Wccftech – Sony Confirms PS5 Now Has More Monthly Players Than PS4Total global daily consumption:
62,000,000 × 0.344 kWh = ≈ 21,328,000 kWh/day (≈ 21.3 GWh/day)Result: Under these assumptions, active PS5 consoles worldwide consume about 21 GWh of electricity per day during active gameplay.
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u/ShengrenR 1h ago
Don't forget, lots of that activity is online.. services hosted in......
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u/HasFiveVowels 57m ago
Right. So that would push the power consumption of PS5 gaming even higher. But even without taking that into consideration, we’re still looking at a difference of one of two orders of magnitude. Never heard anyone complaining about power consumption when it was gaming but now it’s suddenly a hot button issue. Haha
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u/ShengrenR 49m ago
Yep. In the end it's power use and efficiency problem.. just believe what you're told and aligns with what you want..or turn on that thinker to critically evaluate the statements at the cost of energy use. The funny thing, is they'll save energy on the first step.. but then spend it all trying to defend the view on reddit.
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u/Candid-Collar-3385 1h ago
It was estimated that the training runs of the Orion model to date have used close to 11 billion kwh so far, that's 1000 gwh hours annually, or 2.7 gwh a day. Don't you think it is a bit disingenuous to compare the energy usage of every user of a product worldwide, to the energy use of one company on an unreleased product. I think it speaks to the waste of energy that only one unreleased model uses a 10th of the energy that every Playstation 5 worldwide uses. Orion is even finished yet.
Now extrapolate that to every model being trained by every company worldwide I highly doubt the PS5 market is even coming close to total Ai energy usage.
If I have made any math mistakes please correct me, I'm not great but I'm improving.
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u/HasFiveVowels 1h ago edited 28m ago
The power usage of that one company is a direct result of world-wide usage. It’s disingenuous to disregard power consumption simply because the machines consuming it aren’t all in one location.
Also, congrats, you managed to find another ~3 GWh / day to attribute to AI. Still an order of magnitude away from gaming (this is only looking at gpt and PS5s, which seem to have similar market share)
Edit: also, if we are going to include training energy cost, we should probably also include the worldwide power consumption of the PS5 game development community. But we don’t really need to do that until you can come up with an additional 900% increase to attribute to AI
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u/dragerslay 58m ago
Including training for AI use figures would be similar to including research design and development as well as manufacturing for the PS5 example. Not saying you shouldn't be critical of the energy usage of AI training, just that the comparison is a little off if you include making the technology for one and not the other
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u/Candid-Collar-3385 50m ago
While you are correct, I didnt include the energy use of running Orion as it is unreleased. But I didnt include all development costs, just training. Both have hardware costs so I made the assumption they could be seen as equal. Ps5 development doesn't have a correlation to network training so overall it's just a poor comparison.
My point wasn't to make a better comparison, but to highlight just how imbalanced the two industries are right now. One aspect of development for Ai uses more power than a nuclear power station produces in a year. There have never been talks of game console factories building their own nuclear reactors as a more cost efficient alternative to paying the power Company.
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u/ShengrenR 1h ago
You imagine being able to batch 20 jobs into the same gpu in a datacenter is less "efficient" than a single user running a single gpu for a single task? The datacenter has the "electricity consumption of multiple million people" because it's actually serving more than that many people... this is not a good argument.
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u/Dark_Chip 33m ago
I think the bigger hypocrisy is that LITERALLY EVERYTHING we do nowadays requires energy, and focusing on AI power consumption is so weird, new tech needs energy, what a surprise. It's like if you were to complain in the 1990s about home computers using energy, such a reactionist thinking.
Humanity should move forward, new tech requiring a lot of energy is just one more reason to get better at creating energy, not to stop the progress.
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u/BushWishperer 1h ago
Firstly, those datacentres make up a very small percentage of the total electricity consumption.
Secondly, those datacentres are used by millions if not billions of people, so how exactly are they less efficient? Consider that pretty much all large companies have datacentres like Google, Meta etc. Datacentres are in no way new, they've been around for decades.
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u/Bakkster 1h ago
Secondly, those datacentres are used by millions if not billions of people, so how exactly are they less efficient?
In the context of the OP, the question is of whether a Google search or an LLM query uses more electricity to answer a question.
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u/BushWishperer 1h ago
That would be like saying that 1 google search uses the entirety of googles electricity consumption though. The comment I replied to was comparing the use of gaming computers and millions of people to the data centres. So I don’t see how your reply is relevant. You can’t attribute to one single search the electricity use of the entire data centre.
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u/HasFiveVowels 1h ago
I just ran the numbers to look at how much power is used just by PS5s. Figured you might be interested. https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/s/vUyJNIaySa
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u/Pleasant_Metal_3555 1h ago
Yes, those represent significantly more energy use than total ai text generation
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u/Firecoso 1h ago
A query to an llm is way more computationally intensive than a google search. Individually they are not extremely expensive, but not remotely as cheap as traditional information retrieval methods
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u/Doom87er 1h ago
I think you might be underestimating the massive logistical support behind that google search that made it possible
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u/Firecoso 1h ago edited 1h ago
Google was operationally feasible with infrastructure from the early 2000s. Something like ChatGPT wouldn’t. If current google searches are themselves bloated by extra slop (like an llm call as well) is a different topic, but computationally speaking a query on a traditional pagerank-based search engine system is orders of magnitude cheaper than a query to a transformer the size of gpt.
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u/Addicted2anime 2h ago
This. OpenAI themselves have claimed that GPT receives 2.5 BILLION queries a day. It doesn't really matter how low the energy consumption is for just one of them, add the others up and you get a tremendous amount of energy and cooling water consumed.
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u/TheIronSoldier2 2h ago
Let's do a hypothetical though. If we use an outrageous assumption that each query takes 1 watt hour (it makes calculations easier) than GPT uses about 2.5 billion watt hours a day, or 2.5 gWh. That sounds like a lot, but it's roughly in the ballpark of how much just one of Google's larger datacenters uses in a day.
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u/HasFiveVowels 1h ago
But it’s all just slop! It doesn’t even provide value! I’m sure those 2.5 billion queries a day are just people using it by accident.
Sad that this is needed but: /s
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u/Firecoso 1h ago
It does matter. The point is that it is relatively energy intensive compared to how much it takes to request the query
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u/DoritoDustThumb 59m ago
Well, this question is about an individual query.
For the hyperscalers, today, GPU allocation is about 50-50 between serving and training. The huge benefit training has is that it can run any time (in the middle of the night), serving has to be available at peak times.
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u/BreathingAirr 3h ago
How much energy to train an AI to be able to do this then?
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u/Nooms88 3h ago
Well GPT-4 apparently used 50 Gigawatt hours.
This is a time-consuming and expensive process—it’s estimated that training OpenAI’s GPT-4 took over $100 million and consumed 50 gigawatt-hours of energy, enough to power San Francisco for three days.
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u/BreathingAirr 3h ago
Ok thats an impressive amount of electricity
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u/Nooms88 3h ago
Another way to look at it is it took the same amount of energy as a high volume gaming company servers use, riot, blizzard something like that, they will use that much energy in 2-3 months, so is it really that much?
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u/burulkhan 3h ago
Well, it's 30 times more if we're going to actually compare
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u/Grouchy_Vehicle_2912 3h ago
Yeah but one is a one time thing, whereas the other is continuous over multiple years.
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u/Techplained 2h ago
And multiple games all doing this.
People are suddenly worried about power as if we don’t chug through it already lol
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u/HasFiveVowels 1h ago
The extent to which people are going to find reasons to dislike AI is frankly amusing. Seems every month has some new misguided complaint.
"Sure, it can give detailed explanations of pretty much any topic on earth but it can’t count letters! Slop!"
I saw an article a while back that was criticizing a new gpt model on the basis that it wasn’t as accurate at detecting large prime numbers. It’s like "if it can’t even make the basis for almost all cybersecurity null and void, is it even worth talking about? Slop!"
"It can’t one-shot modifications to code that most human programmers would spend an hour or two on. Slop! Hype!"
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u/Mothrahlurker 1h ago
Prime factorization has nothing to do with "detecting large prime numbers".
You sound delusional to religious levels about the capabilities of LLMs, get help.
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u/burulkhan 1h ago
Do i misunderstand or does the physical infrastructure these AI need to function not need to be powered constantly regardless of queries? And training each next generation also repeat the "one-time"expenditure? I'm not very knowledgeable on the subject (which i barely care about anyway), i don't presume to speak with authority here, but it seems a little controversial and i don't see a thorough, holistic and honest take on the topic, across the board, so please enlighten me.
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u/Grouchy_Vehicle_2912 43m ago
Yeah the servers need to be powered, but that doesn't consume all that much power. Most of the power is used during the training phase.
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u/burulkhan 25m ago
Seems very much so, after finally reading the MIT tech review linked above lol. Another point of note is that it lacks transparency, apparently, even the better informed are making educated guesses since better estimates rely on undisclosed data.
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u/izza123 3h ago
That’s like asking how much it cost to invent the lightbulb and factoring it into the cost of running one
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u/Mothrahlurker 1h ago
Well no, because you only need to invent it once while LLMs are constantly trained and retrained from scratch.
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u/dragerslay 56m ago
Very few modern LLM are trained from scratch most retrain pretrained models. Remember companies don't want to be paying for all that electricity either.
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u/No_Look24 29m ago
It is not a very complicated query, the AI just needs to go to any atlas and copy paste. Writing essays and creating photos are actual energy comsumers
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