AI Water Converter
Estimate the water footprint of your prompts. Uses 0.32 ml per prompt and fills relative to a 250 ml cup.
Prompt to water
Enter how many prompts you used to see ml and cups filled.
1 prompt = 0.32 ml. 1 cup = 250 ml.
Total usage
0 ml
Fill shows cups in 250 ml steps (max 10 shown).
Cups filled
0.00
This calculator is an illustrative estimate based on 0.32 ml per prompt and a 250 ml cup. Actual water use varies with model choice, region, cooling methods, energy mix, and upstream supply chain impacts (including building and operating data centres), so treat this as a rough guide rather than a precise footprint.
FAQ
According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the average ChatGPT query uses around 0.000085 gallons (≈ 0.32 millilitres) of water, roughly one-fifteenth of a teaspoon, mainly for cooling data centre infrastructure. Source: IBTimes report.
Water intensity depends on the specific model, data centre cooling type, regional climate, hardware efficiency, and even the electricity mix. Those factors vary over time and location, so the figure here is a simplified average.
Some facilities recirculate or reclaim water, which can lower net consumption. This calculator does not adjust for site-level reuse, so think of the value as a ballpark for fresh water drawn.
OpenAI traffic isn’t publicly broken out, but industry estimates point to roughly 2.5 billion prompts per day. At 0.32 ml each, that’s ≈ 800,000 litres daily (about 3.2 million cups), roughly a third of an Olympic swimming pool or around 16,000 typical showers (50 L each).