Does saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT waste energy?
The claim: “Saying please and thank you to ChatGPT costs tens of millions of dollars in electricity.”
Partly. Every message uses some electricity, but Sam Altman’s “tens of millions of dollars well spent” was an offhand reply on X, not a measurement: TechCrunch judged he didn’t do a precise calculation. Adding “please” to a question is a word or two more for the model to read, which barely changes it. A separate “thank you” is one more short message. OpenAI says an average question uses 0.34 Wh, about an oven running for a little over one second, and Epoch AI’s estimates shrink with shorter answers.
The bigger pictureChatGPT handled 18 billion messages a week by July 2025: about 0.32 TWh a year at 0.34 Wh each, by Hum’s sums. All the world’s data centres used about 485 TWh in 2025.
How big is that?
- One short AI question0.34 WhOpenAI says 0.34 Wh; other published figures differ
- Charging a phone once19 WhUS EPA, about 19 Whabout 56× the line above
- One short AI video clip90 Whabout 90 Wh, measured by Hugging Faceabout 4.7× the line above
- Boiling a litre of water99 Whabout 99 Wh from 15 °C, by Hum’s sums from physicsabout the same as the line above
- A US home for a day28 kWhabout 28 kWh, Epoch AI from US dataabout 283× the line above
- A US home for a year11 MWhabout 10,500 kWh, Epoch AI from US dataabout 375× the line above
- AI in the world’s data centres for a year156 TWhabout 156 TWh by Hum’s sums: the middle of the US share of AI, 26.5 to 38%, used as a world estimateabout 14.9 million times the line above
- All the world’s data centres for a year485 TWhabout 485 TWh in 2025, IEAabout 3.1× the line above
The dots sit on a log scale: each step to the right is ten times bigger. It’s the only way a phone charge and all the world’s data centres fit on one line.
Why the claim misleads
It treats an offhand reply from OpenAI’s CEO as if it were a measured bill.
What nobody knows yet
- Nobody has published how many ChatGPT messages are only pleasantries.
- OpenAI hasn’t published how its 0.34 Wh is measured, or what a very short reply uses.
- Hum read Altman’s reply as TechCrunch quoted it; the post on X can’t be opened without signing in.
Sources (6)
- TechCrunch (Anthony Ha, April 2025), quoting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s reply on X Company says so
“tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know.”
Quote checked on the page, 25 Oct 2026 - TechCrunch (Anthony Ha, April 2025) Estimated
“Judging from Altman’s tongue-in-cheek tone, it’s probably safe to assume he didn’t do a precise calculation.”
Quote checked on the page, 25 Oct 2026 - OpenAI (Sam Altman; average query, method not published) Company says so
“the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second”
Quote checked on the page, 2 Oct 2026 - Epoch AI (estimate for a GPT-4o answer of about 500 tokens) Estimated
“If your ChatGPT usage tends to produce much longer or shorter responses than this, you can adjust our final estimate in proportion to understand your own footprint.”
Quote checked on the page, 25 Oct 2026 - NBER Working Paper 34255 (OpenAI and Harvard), How People Use ChatGPT Measured
“By July 2025, 18 billion messages were being sent each week by 700 million users, representing around 10% of the global adult population.”
Quote checked on the page, 18 Oct 2026 - IEA, Key Questions on Energy and AI (2026) Estimated
“electricity consumption from data centres roughly doubling from 485 TWh in 2025 to 950 TWh in 2030”
Quote checked on the page, 3 Oct 2026
Hum’s sums
- 18 billion × 52 weeks × 0.34 Wh ≈ 0.32 TWh a year
Cite this
TechCrunch (Anthony Ha, April 2025), quoting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s reply on X, as quoted in Hum, “Does saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT waste energy?”, https://humearth.org/q/please-thank-you (quote checked 25 Oct 2026).
Cite the original source first; Hum is where you found it.
What do Wh, kWh and TWh mean?
Wh is a watt-hour: a 1-watt light left on for an hour. 1 kWh = 1,000 Wh, and 1 TWh = 1 billion kWh. Hum compares each number with something everyday so you don’t need the units.
Send this answer
Saying “thank you” to ChatGPT costs about as much as any short message: 0.34 Wh or less, by OpenAI’s figure. Sam Altman’s “tens of millions of dollars” was a quip, not a calculation.