ChatGPT’s meteoric rise to 810 million weekly active users by late 2025 has come at a staggering environmental and financial cost.
Experts’ new calculations reveal the AI chatbot gulps down 17.23 billion kilowatt-hours (GWh) of electricity annually just to answer user questions.
This is equivalent to charging 3.29 billion iPhone 17s for a year, or charging every Electric Vehicle in the US 36 times or powering 1.6 million households for a year or supplying electricity to the USA for a day and a half.
The amount of energy used by ChatGPT in a year can also match the annual consumption of countries such as Puerto Rico or Slovenia.
OpenAI’s flagship model hit 300 million weekly users in December 2024, doubling from earlier figures, and surged to 810 million by year’s end, with projections eyeing 1 billion in 2026.
This user boom translates to 2.5 billion daily queries.
Daily, ChatGPT consumes 47.2 GWh, which is more than Puerto Rico or Croatia uses in a day.
In the U.S., the average commercial rate is 14.06 cents per kilowatt-hour.
This adds up to over Ksh300 billion ($2.42 billion) in yearly electricity bills, or about Ksh 350 ($0.0027) per query.
As OpenAI rolls out advanced features like audio, video, and image generation, these costs could skyrocket further.
Compounding the issue are OpenAI’s new reasoning models, such as the default ChatGPT-5, which tackle PhD-level science, coding, and multimodal tasks with human-like “thinking” time.
These enhancements boost accuracy but demand far more energy per response, raising alarms about sustainability in the AI arms race.
Experts warn that without greener data centres or efficiency breakthroughs, AI’s energy appetite could strain global grids.
OpenAI has not commented on specific mitigation plans, but industry shifts toward renewable-powered infrastructure may be the only path forward, experts say.