In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses

So some Gemini prompts use much more energy than this: Dean gives the example of feeding dozens of books into Gemini and asking it to produce a detailed synopsis of their content. “That’s the kind of thing that will probably take more energy than the median prompt,” Dean says. Using a reasoning model could also have a higher associated energy demand because these models take more steps before producing an answer.

This report was also strictly limited to text prompts, so it doesn’t represent what’s needed to generate an image or a video. (Other analyses, including one in MIT Technology Review’s Power Hungry series earlier this year, show that these tasks can require much more energy.)

The report also finds that the total energy used to field a Gemini query has fallen dramatically over time. The median Gemini prompt used 33 times more energy in May 2024 than it did in May 2025, according to Google. The company points to advancements in its models and other software optimizations for the improvements.  

Google also estimates the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the median prompt, which they put at 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide. To get to this number, the company multiplied the total energy used to respond to a prompt by the average emissions per unit of electricity.

Rather than using an emissions estimate based on the US grid average, or the average of the grids where Google operates, the company instead uses a market-based estimate, which takes into account electricity purchases that the company makes from clean energy projects. The company has signed agreements to buy over 22 gigawatts of power from sources including solar, wind, geothermal, and advanced nuclear projects since 2010. Because of those purchases, Google’s emissions per unit of electricity on paper are roughly one-third of those on the average grid where it operates.

AI data centers also consume water for cooling, and Google estimates that each prompt consumes 0.26 milliliters of water, or about five drops. 

The goal of this work was to provide users a window into the energy use of their interactions with AI, Dean says. 

“People are using [AI tools] for all kinds of things, and they shouldn’t have major concerns about the energy usage or the water usage of Gemini models, because in our actual measurements, what we were able to show was that it’s actually equivalent to things you do without even thinking about it on a daily basis,” he says, “like watching a few seconds of TV or consuming five drops of water.”