ChatGPT’s popularity exploded instantly upon its November 2022 debut — acquiring a staggering 100 million active users in two months — but concerns about the technology’s drain on resources have risen in tandem.
Quantifying the environmental impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has been an elusive endeavor, and as The Guardian observed, OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman have been frustratingly opaque about the energy demands of its newest offering, GPT-5.
What’s happening?
Per The Guardian, as of mid-2023, a simple query using ChatGPT used “about as much electricity as an incandescent bulb consumes in 2 minutes.”
Research published as a preprint in March 2023 looked at ChatGPT’s water usage, asserting that training the GPT-3 model could “directly evaporate 700,000 liters of clean freshwater, but such information has been kept a secret.”
On August 7, ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI introduced GPT-5, its latest and most feature-heavy offering.
GPT-5 represented “a significant leap in intelligence over all our previous models, featuring state-of-the-art performance across coding, math, writing, health, visual perception, and more,” OpenAI claimed as the model was unveiled.
The Guardian’s coverage pointed out that ChatGPT’s usage of resources would likely increase in conjunction with its capabilities, adding that OpenAI had been markedly silent on the subject over the past five years.
While OpenAI hasn’t been forthcoming, experts weighed in on what they suspect is necessarily a thirstier, energy-gobbling ChatGPT model.
“A more complex model like GPT-5 consumes more power both during training and during inference … I can safely say that it’s going to consume a lot more power than GPT-4,” said University of Illinois professor Rakesh Kumar, who researches AI and energy usage.
Why is GPT-5’s energy usage concerning?
ChatGPT’s leap from a million to 100 million users wasn’t a blip — back in March, TechCrunch analyzed more recent usage trends following its introduction in November 2022.
“By November 2023, ChatGPT had reached another milestone of 100 million weekly active users, which grew to 300 million by December 2024, then 400 million in February 2025,” the outlet explained.
Citing initial calculations from the University of Rhode Island’s AI lab on Friday, August 8, The Guardian surmised that GPT-5’s capabilities could require an amount of energy that “would correspond to burning that incandescent bulb for 18 minutes.”
Put another way, GPT-5 could use as much daily energy as 1.5 million households in the United States.
University of California, Riverside, AI researcher Shaolei Ren said GPT-5’s energy requirements “should be orders of magnitude higher than that for GPT-3” based on its size alone.
What can be done about AI’s environmental impact?
Although AI researchers can make credible estimates, experts called for responsible corporate disclosures.
“It’s more critical than ever to address AI’s true environmental cost. We call on OpenAI and other developers to use this moment to commit to full transparency by publicly disclosing GPT-5’s environmental impact,” said University of Rhode Island professor Marwan Abdelatti.
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