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Measuring the environmental impact of AI inference
The company claims that a text query now burns the equivalent of 9 seconds of TV.
"We estimate the median Gemini Apps text prompt uses 0.24 watt-hours of energy, emits 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent (gCO2e), and consumes 0.26 milliliters (or about five drops) of water," they conclude. The company has chosen to execute an AI operation with every single search request, a compute demand that simply didn't exist a couple of years ago. Data center management also plays a role, as the company can make sure that any active hardware is fully utilized, while allowing the rest to stay in a low-power state.
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