The University of Rhode Island’s AI lab estimates that GPT-5 averages just over 18 Wh per query, so putting all of ChatGPT’s reported 2.5 billion requests a day through the model could see energy usage as high as 45 GWh.
A daily energy use of 45 GWh is enormous. A typical modern nuclear power plant produces between 1 and 1.6 GW of electricity per reactor per hour, so data centers running OpenAI’s GPT-5 at 18 Wh per query could require the power equivalent of two to three nuclear power reactors, an amount that could be enough to power a small country.
It is unprofitable, though.
OpenAI recently hit $10 billion in ARR and are likely to hit $12.7b by the end of the year, but they’re still losing a lot of money. They don’t think they’ll make a profit until 2029, and only if they hit their target of $125 billion revenue. That’s a huge amount of growth - 10x in 4 years - so I’m interested as to if they’ll actually hit it.
Okay, make it sound worse and even more unprofitable.
Making their AI models cheaper to run (such as by requiring less electricity) is one step along that path to profitability.