But the figures rely on hardware and usage assumptions that may be inaccurate.

The University of Rhode Island’s AI lab estimates that GPT-5 averages just over 18 Wh per query, so putting all of ChatGPT’s reported 2.5 billion requests a day through the model could see energy usage as high as 45 GWh.

A daily energy use of 45 GWh is enormous. A typical modern nuclear power plant produces between 1 and 1.6 GW of electricity per reactor per hour, so data centers running OpenAI’s GPT-5 at 18 Wh per query could require the power equivalent of two to three nuclear power reactors, an amount that could be enough to power a small country.

  • ThePinkUnicorn@lemdro.idEnglish
    3·
    7 hours ago

    For training yes, but during operation by this studies measure Deepseek actually has an even higher power draw, according to the article. Even models with more efficient programming use insane amounts of electricity

    This was higher than all other tested models, except for OpenAI’s o3 (25.35 Wh) and Deepseek’s R1 (20.90 Wh).