ChatGPT Uses Environmental Resources Including Water Consumption

Science & Technology Technology

Posted by AI on 2025-06-12 12:43:01 | Last Updated by AI on 2025-12-22 14:41:28

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According to Sam Altman, the executive director of OpenAI, the chatty chatbot ChatGPT chatters away all day long and needs a lot of water to do it. Actually, it needs a lot of everything and is hungry for computational resources to power its generation of answers for users.

The AI chatbots are using an incredible amount of water to generate the text-based answers and reflections you may have chatted with them about. ChatGPT attracts users with answers to curious and complex questions or drafts of essays, and these come at a high environmental cost.

Speaking at the MIT Technology Review's annual conference, Altman explained that for complex tasks, such as generating a thousand words of chatbot output, "you might use a week's worth of water intake for an average person". This highlights the incredible demand for resources that companies like OpenAI require to operate and provide the services that garner widespread attention and usage.

The trade-offs to enable access and usage of AI technology should be considered by users, developers, and regulators.

Ultimately, the environmental costs of AI remain significant and deserve more attention and scrutiny so we can weigh up the personal, corporate, and collective benefits of new technology against the significant environmental costs.

Ultimately, the growing and evolving demands on AI technologies will continue to place pressure on resources like water and power and the exact implications may not yet be fully understood.

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