ChatGPT’s electricity consumption, pt. II
An estimate of ChatGPT’s costs supports estimate that ChatGPT uses millions of kilowatt hours per month.
I recently published an article in which I estimate ChatGPT’s electricity consumption in January 2023 to be between 1.1M and 23M KWh.
23M KWh is roughly the same amount of energy that 175,000 Danes use in a month on average.
I’ve since come across an article by Dylan Patel and Afzal Ahmad that estimates the monetary costs of running ChatGPT [1]. To calculate the costs, Patel and Ahmad assume that ChatGPT has 13M daily active users and that each user makes an average of 15 queries per day. Based on this, they estimate that it takes 28,936 Nvidia A100 GPUs to serve ChatGPT.
Let’s now see how my initial estimate of ChatGPT’s energy consumption compares if we use Patel and Ahmad’s numbers.
Let’s start by calculating ChatGPT’s electricity use if it has 13M daily users who each make 15 requests.
