What AI Actually Costs the Planet

Each chatbot reply uses real electricity, real cooling water, and real grid capacity. A single image generation can use as much energy as charging your phone. None of this means you should never use AI — but knowing the cost helps you choose when it's worth it and push companies to do better.

Some examples

• A long chat session can use 10x the energy of a Google search.
• Image and video generation are dramatically more expensive than text.
• Smaller, on-device models exist for many tasks and use far less energy.
• Some providers publish per-query carbon estimates — look for them.

Try it!

Pick one task you usually ask AI for that a smaller tool could handle. Switch for a week and notice if you missed anything.