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We know that young people are concerned about sustainability and the environment — perhaps especially so under President Trump. Since taking office in January, his administration’s “assault on the country’s climate ambitions,” a recent New York Times op-ed argues, “is not just enraging but also perversely awe inspiring.” It makes sense that people — as they watch the government undermine environmental policy — are trying to figure out what they can do as individuals.

Teen Vogue recently observed that more readers are coming to our site via ChatGPT, specifically through searches for actions you can take on sustainability. It’s no wonder, when we’re seeing a growing reliance on AI chatbots for everything from drafting texts to therapy — and with sometimes scary results. (Nonetheless, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg recently suggested that AI chatbots could take the place of IRL friends.)

Those searching for how to live sustainably might not realize that using ChatGPT itself has consequences for the environment. “Most people are not aware of the resource usage underlying ChatGPT,” Shaolei Ren, an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside, who studies AI’s impact on climate, told the Associated Press in 2023. “If you’re not aware of the resource usage, then there’s no way that we can help conserve the resources.”

So we’re here to help break it down: ChatGPT is a large language model, or LLM, which is an AI-based machine-learning model that is trained on large amounts of data, enabling it to create writing that might look, in theory, as though a human made it. Training LLMs like ChatGPT require a huge amount of computing power, as well as for generating answers. The servers that provide this power need to be kept cool, which often requires significant amounts of water.

Then there are the energy needs. Substantial quantities of electricity are often required to train, fine-tune, and run LLMs, creating carbon emissions and potential energy strain, according to MIT News. Estimates vary on the amount of resources a ChatGPT search requires compared with a typical Google search (sans AI overviews), but a 2024 report from the International Energy Agency placed the chatbot’s energy usage for a single query at nearly 10 times that of the search engine.

Amid the demand for expanding AI usage, companies like Google and Meta are rushing to expand their energy capacity, particularly by investing in nuclear energy, which doesn’t emit greenhouse gases but, critics say, comes with its own set of potential problems for people and the environment. Microsoft is looking to resurrect a closed-down nuclear plant as one way to power its AI offerings.

A 2024 analysis of the energy output of using ChatGPT by the Washington Post and researchers at UC Riverside found that just one 100-word email drafted by ChatGPT-4 uses about a water bottle’s worth of H2O, and enough electricity to power 14 LED lightbulbs for an hour. (If you want to see some visualizations of the resources used by AI to help make one example feel more tangible, the estimations in that WaPo piece are a great place to start.) According to the Post, data centers are also sapping the US power grid, which has historically been under-invested in and under-resourced.