Ever Wonder How Much Energy That AI Prompt Uses? This Tool Tells You.
Have you ever thought about how much electricity it takes just to ask an AI to write an email — or even to say “thank you”? Julien Delavande, an engineer at Hugging Face, certainly has. Now, he’s built a tool to give users real-time insight into just how much energy their AI interactions consume.
AI models run on powerful GPUs and specialized chips that require significant electricity. As AI adoption continues to grow, so does its energy footprint, raising concerns among researchers and environmentalists alike.
To raise awareness, Delavande and collaborators have launched a lightweight tool that estimates the energy cost of sending and receiving prompts through popular models like Meta’s Llama 3.3 70B and Google’s Gemma 3 via Chat UI, an open-source front end.
Tiny Prompts, Big Footprint
The tool provides energy usage estimates in Watt-hours or Joules, offering context by comparing it to common household appliances. For example, getting Llama 3.3 70B to draft a basic email uses around 0.1841 Watt-hours — the energy equivalent of running a microwave for 0.12 seconds or turning on a toaster for just 0.02 seconds.
Delavande doesn’t claim the tool is perfectly accurate. But that’s not the point.
“Even small energy savings can scale up across millions of queries — model choice or output length can lead to major environmental impact,” Delavande and the team said in a statement.
Transparency, One Prompt at a Time
As more organizations race to integrate AI, transparency about its environmental costs has become crucial. While tech companies have embraced performance benchmarks, energy consumption remains an overlooked metric.
Delavande’s tool is part of a larger movement to make AI’s energy use more visible and understandable, possibly paving the way for “AI nutrition labels” in the future.
“With projects like the AI energy score and broader research on AI’s energy footprint, we’re pushing for transparency in the open source community,” Delavande said. “One day, energy usage could be as visible as nutrition labels on food!”
So next time you chat with an AI model, remember: even a simple prompt has a cost — and now you can measure it.
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