Overview

• Google reports a median 0.24 Wh of electricity, 0.26 ml of water and 0.03 g CO2‑equivalent per Gemini text request.
• The company equates the electricity used for a single text query to roughly nine seconds of television viewing.
• Its paper details a methodology that accounts for AI chips, memory, general CPUs, idle capacity kept for spikes and data‑center cooling.
• Google says average per‑text‑query energy fell about 33× and CO2 about 44× over the past year, crediting mixture‑of‑experts designs and custom chips.
• The disclosed figures exclude model training and non‑text requests, and other estimates such as OpenAI’s 0.34 Wh per query remain higher as overall data‑center demand grows.