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How Hungry Is AI? Benchmarking Energy, Water, and Carbon Footprint of LLM Infere (arxiv.org)
1 point by raybb on Aug 8, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A new tool estimates the electricity, water, and pollution behind each AI chatbot answer by combining public speed data with datacenter energy and water factors. The hungriest models use over 29 watt-hours for one long prompt, over 65 times the most efficient ones.

Abstract · How Hungry is AI? Benchmarking Energy, Water, and Carbon Footprint of LLM Inference

This paper introduces an infrastructure-aware benchmarking framework for quantifying the environmental footprint of LLM inference across 30 state-of-the-art models in commercial datacenters. The framework combines public API performance data with company-specific environmental multipliers and statistical inference of hardware configurations. We additionally utilize cross-efficiency Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to rank models by performance relative to environmental cost and provide a dynamically updated dashboard that visualizes model-level energy, water, and carbon metrics. Results show the most energy-intensive models exceed 29 Wh per long prompt, over 65 times the most efficient systems. Even a 0.42 Wh short query, when scaled to 700M queries/day, aggregates to annual electricity comparable to 35{,}000 U.S. homes, evaporative freshwater equal to the annual drinking needs of 1.2M people, and carbon emissions requiring a Chicago-sized forest to offset. These findings highlight a growing paradox: as AI becomes cheaper and faster, global adoption drives disproportionate resource consumption. Our methodology offers a standardized, empirically grounded basis for sustainability benchmarking and accountability in AI deployment.

Nidhal Jegham, Marwan Abdelatti, Chan Young Koh, Lassad Elmoubarki, Abdeltawab Hendawi
arXiv:2505.09598 · cs.CY, cs.AI · submitted May 14, 2025 · updated Nov 24, 2025
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