Which AI Models Use the Most Energy?

The rise of artificial intelligence is driving an historic surge in electricity demand that’s boosting fossil fuel use and threatening climate progress. All this electricity doesn’t power AI in some generalized, always-on way, though. Data centers’ energy consumption is a function of the millions of individual queries users submit to AI programs such as Claude and ChatGPT.

When it comes to how efficiently models process those queries and generate responses, AI models are not interchangeable. Some are more like gas guzzlers, others more like Priuses.

When a user engages an AI chatbot or AI agent, there’s essentially no way for them to know which kind of vehicle they are stepping into. They may know which company built it, and even the precise model name and number, but no AI company has published information about how much energy one model uses compared to another.

In the absence of corporate disclosure from the big three proprietary AI developers — Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google — researchers with the Sustainable AI Group, a research and advisory company, developed a backdoor method to estimate and compare the amount of energy these developers’ models consume. They published their findings on Tuesday in an interactive dashboard that ranks AI programs by energy intensity.