Your ChatGPT question uses about as much electricity as a kettle boiled for one second
AI data centres ate roughly 0.5% of the world's electricity in 2025. That sounds small until you look at where those data centres actually are.
Key points
- The International Energy Agency estimates global data centres used around 485 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025, roughly equal to Germany's entire annual electricity output.
- AI-focused data centres accounted for about one-third of that total, meaning AI consumed approximately 0.5% of the world's electricity in 2025.
- A single text query to a large language model such as Google Gemini uses around 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, less energy than a microwave uses in one second.
- In Virginia, data centres consume more than one quarter of the state's total electricity supply.
- The IEA projects data centres could reach 3% of global electricity demand by 2030, with AI facilities driving most of that growth.
Every time you ask ChatGPT to write a work email or help you plan dinner, a server somewhere burns a tiny slice of electricity to answer you. How tiny? Google, one of the first companies to publish this kind of detail, released figures in 2025 showing a standard text query to its Gemini model, a large language model (the technology that powers chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude), uses around 0.24 watt-hours of electricity. That is less than what a kettle uses in a single second.
So individual queries are cheap. The bigger question is what happens when hundreds of millions of people ask questions all day, every day.
According to the International Energy Agency, global data centres, the large warehouse-style buildings packed with servers that run our digital services, used about 485 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025. To put that in human terms: it is roughly what Germany generates in a whole year, and it equals about 1.5% of all the electricity produced on Earth.
Not all of that is AI. Email, Netflix, Google Maps and online banking all live in data centres too. AI-specific facilities account for roughly one-third of the total. So AI itself was responsible for about 0.5% of global electricity in 2025. That is a meaningful number, but it is still smaller than many people assume.
Should I feel guilty about using AI tools?
Probably not about your individual queries, but the geography matters more than the global headline. Data centre demand is heavily concentrated in a small number of places, and that is where the real pressure lands. Ireland, for example, has data centres eating more than 20% of its national electricity supply. Virginia is above 25%. Even if the worldwide figure looks manageable, local grids in those spots are already feeling the strain.
The other catch is growth. The IEA's base-case forecast puts data centres at 3% of global electricity by 2030, with AI facilities responsible for most of the increase. Some analysts think even that projection is too cautious.
On the privacy side, it is worth knowing that the energy figures above cover what happens on the server. The electricity your own phone or laptop uses to run an AI app is separate and not counted in these estimates.
For now, your occasional ChatGPT question is not going to tilt the energy grid. The pressure is coming from the sheer scale of infrastructure being built, not from any one person hitting send.
