Power-hungry AI: This is how much Chat GPT is said to have used

04.05.2025

Source: E & M powernews

Chatbots such as Chat GPT and Deepseek are causing a stir. One thing is often overlooked: The energy consumption of these artificially intelligent helpers is gigantic.

After the Chinese AI chatbot "DeepSeek" shook up the technology world because it is said to be around 95% less resource-hungry than the well-known chatbot from US company Open AI, Chat GPT, questions have been raised about the feasibility of existing and future AI projects.

At the beginning of January, US President Donald Trump (Republican) presented a new AI project called Stargate. It aims to strengthen the AI infrastructure in the United States. As part of the initiative, a total of five data centers are being developed across the country, each of which will consume enormous amounts of electricity for the development and training of new, advanced versions of Chat GPT.

In order to estimate the power requirements of this gigantic project, the team at the stockbroker portal Bestbrokers investigated the power consumption that occurs during the training of existing models by Open AI.

According to the study, each new version of the chatbot has so far required more resources, including electricity. During the 34 days of training Chat GPT-3, which had 175 billion parameters, 1.287 million kWh of electricity was used. The subsequent, much more advanced model required a longer training period, which also consumed more resources.

This means that the power consumption of training Chat GPT-4 was 16.5 times that of training Chat GPT-3. If the next iteration of the chatbot, which is likely to be researched and trained in the upcoming Stargate facilities, consumes as much power, it could require an average of 10.258 million kWh of electricity per day.

Enormous amounts of energy

These are enormous amounts of electricity that would be enough to power 353,786 US homes, based on an average US household's electricity consumption of 29 kWh per day or 10,590 kWh per year. While China's Deepseek claims to reduce energy demand, US-based Open AI and its chatbot require enormous resources.

Of course, such calculations are purely speculative and based on existing data and estimates on previous versions of Chat GPT, so they should be taken with a grain of salt.

According to Business Insider, the first Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas, will have a natural gas plant that will provide up to 360.5 million kWh of electricity per year. It will be built with ten simple-cycle turbines supplied by Massachusetts-based GE Vernova and Caterpillar's Solar Turbines subsidiary. In addition, batteries and renewable energy from solar panels are planned for the plant.

The Stargate initiative, led by Open AI, will be a joint venture in which US software giant Oracle, Japan's Softbank and investment firm MGX from Abu Dhabi are also involved. With an investment of 500 billion US dollars (487 billion euros) over the next four years, Stargate will focus on creating advanced data centers equipped with cutting-edge technology to support AI research and applications.

Further information and estimates on the power consumption of processing 1 billion requests per day through Chat GPT can be found in the full report on the Bestbrokers homepage.

Author: Silvia Rausch-Becker