Google reports full-stack per-prompt footprint for Gemini

Google has released a technical paper detailing a full-stack approach to measuring the environmental footprint of its Gemini AI prompts, arguing that traditional methods miss substantial parts of the picture. The company estimates that a median Gemini text prompt costs about 0.24 watt-hours of energy, emits roughly 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent, and uses about 0.26 milliliters of water, or five drops. It frames this as a much more comprehensive assessment than widely cited figures that focus only on the active computing hardware. In its assessment, the company also notes meaningful efficiency gains over the past year, with energy per prompt down by about a factor of 33 and carbon emissions down by about a factor of 44, even as usage has grown.

Under the full-stack framework, energy and water use are calculated beyond the active chips used to generate a response. The methodology includes power drawn by idle servers, the energy consumed by CPUs and memory, data-center overhead, cooling systems, and water for cooling. It also accounts for infrastructure that must remain on to handle demand spikes and for the energy used by other processes running within the same...