OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed that each ChatGPT query uses about 0.34 watt-hours of electricity and 0.000085 gallons of water.

He shared this on Monday in a post on X (formerly Twitter), addressing growing public interest in the environmental footprint of AI tools.

Altman noted that while the impact per query is small—roughly equal to running a 60-watt lightbulb for 20 seconds—the scale of global usage makes energy efficiency and sustainability critical.

“The average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one-fifteenth of a teaspoon,” he said.

Altman noted that as data center operations become more automated, the cost of running AI systems—and therefore the cost of intelligence—is likely to decline over time.

“The cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity,” he noted.

Altman spoke about the disruptive impact of AI, acknowledging the difficult reality that some job categories will disappear entirely. Despite these challenges, he expressed optimism that the rapid pace of wealth creation and forward-thinking policy could open the door to bold, previously unimaginable ideas—paving the way for new forms of work and societal progress.

“There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand, the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before,” he wrote.

He also observed that while societies may not adopt a new social contract immediately, gradual shifts over time will lead to transformative change.

“We probably won’t adopt a new social contract all at once, but when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted to something big,” he said