AI's energy footprint - MIT analysis

[wtg]

The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next.

We spoke to two dozen experts measuring AI’s energy demands, evaluated different AI models and prompts, pored over hundreds of pages of projections and reports, and questioned top AI model makers about their plans. Ultimately, we found that the common understanding of AI’s energy consumption is full of holes.

We started small, as the question of how much a single query costs is vitally important to understanding the bigger picture. That’s because those queries are being built into ever more applications beyond standalone chatbots: from search, to agents, to the mundane daily apps we use to track our fitness, shop online, or book a flight. The energy resources required to power this artificial-intelligence revolution are staggering, and the world’s biggest tech companies have made it a top priority to harness ever more of that energy, aiming to reshape our energy grids in the process.

From MIT Technology Review. Their analysis as to how much energy a query or a generated image requires to produce really got my attention.

For instance:

An older version of the model, released in August, made videos at just eight frames per second at a grainy resolution—more like a GIF than a video. Each one required about 109,000 joules to produce. But three months later the company launched a larger, higher-quality model that produces five-second videos at 16 frames per second (this frame rate still isn’t high definition; it’s the one used in Hollywood’s silent era until the late 1920s). The new model uses more than 30 times more energy on each 5-second video: about 3.4 million joules, more than 700 times the energy required to generate a high-quality image. This is equivalent to riding 38 miles on an e-bike, or running a microwave for over an hour.

And it actually turns out it probably takes less energy to generate an image than to generate text in response to the query. They explain why.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

[ShiroKuro]

@wtg thanks a lot for posting this! I will download it to read later.

[Axtremus]

Now think about how many will get AI to generate a synopsis for that MIT report so they can get the salient points quickly, and how much energy that will use.