Energy & water | AI TrackerElectricity, water and emissions per prompt and in aggregate, compared with everything else.https://www.justaparrot.com/enAI TrackerA text prompt uses a few drops of cooling water, about 45 mL over its whole life cyclehttps://www.justaparrot.com/e/ai-prompt-water/https://www.justaparrot.com/e/ai-prompt-water/Google and OpenAI report about 0.3 mL per typical prompt. Adding power-plant water gives 1.35 mL; Mistral's whole-life figure is 45 mL.Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTenergy-waterA typical AI text prompt uses 0.2–0.4 Wh, about 50× less than a minute of microwavinghttps://www.justaparrot.com/e/ai-text-prompt-energy/https://www.justaparrot.com/e/ai-text-prompt-energy/Google, OpenAI, Epoch AI and a Microsoft-led study agree on 0.24–0.34 Wh for a typical text prompt. Long, agent or video tasks use far more.Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTenergy-watermythsAgents, long documents and video can use 10× to 1,000× more energy than a short AI prompthttps://www.justaparrot.com/e/heavy-ai-workloads-energy/https://www.justaparrot.com/e/heavy-ai-workloads-energy/A short prompt uses about 0.3 Wh, a very long document about 40 Wh, an agent task about 50 Wh. New data centres are built for heavy uses.Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTenergy-watercost-of-intelligenceData centres used about 1.5% of the world's electricity in 2025; AI-focused ones about 0.5%https://www.justaparrot.com/e/global-data-centre-electricity/https://www.justaparrot.com/e/global-data-centre-electricity/Data centres used about 485 TWh in 2025, up 17% in a year, the IEA estimates. It expects about 950 TWh, around 3% of world demand, by 2030.Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTenergy-waterMyth check: “AI is destroying the environment”https://www.justaparrot.com/e/myth-ai-destroying-environment/https://www.justaparrot.com/e/myth-ai-destroying-environment/AI-focused data centres used about 0.5% of the world's electricity in 2025. That is small but growing fast, and local strain is real.Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTmythsenergy-waterUS data centres used 17 billion gallons of water on site in 2023, golf courses 30× morehttps://www.justaparrot.com/e/us-data-centre-water-in-context/https://www.justaparrot.com/e/us-data-centre-water-in-context/The real problem is local: many new data centres are being built in places short of water. Nationally, golf courses use about 30× more.Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTenergy-watermythsMyth check: “Every ChatGPT query uses a bottle of water”https://www.justaparrot.com/e/myth-chatgpt-bottle-of-water/https://www.justaparrot.com/e/myth-chatgpt-bottle-of-water/The ‘bottle’ comes from older estimates that covered 10–50 answers or assumed far more energy. Today's reports: about 0.3 mL per prompt.Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMTmythsenergy-water