How much energy does a single chatbot prompt use? This AI tool can show you

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET AI systems require a lot of energy to function, but no one has exact numbers, especially not for individual chatbot queries. To address this, an engineer at Hugging Face built a tool to try to find out. Also: The top 20 AI tools of 2025 - and the #1 thing to remember when you use them The language surrounding AI infrastructure, much of which emphasizes "the cloud" and other air-themed metaphors, can obscure the fact that it relies on energy-hungry computers. To run complex computations quickly, AI systems require powerful chips, multiple GPUs, and expansive data centers, all of which consume power when you ask ChatGPT a question. This is part of why free-tier access to many chatbots comes with usage limits: electricity costs make computing expensive for the hosting company. Chat UI Energy To demystify some of this, Hugging Face engineer Julien Delavande built an AI chat interface that shows real-time energy use estimates for your conversations. It comp ... Read full article.