Your AI footprint for a year
The calculator gives a year by default. This page is about what that year means, and which parts of it are actually known.
The arithmetic
Messages per day, multiplied by watt-hours per message, divided by a thousand for kilowatt-hours, multiplied by 365. Water is the same shape with millilitres. Carbon multiplies the kilowatt-hours by the grid factor. Nothing else is hidden in the calculation.
For twenty ordinary messages a day the result is around 7.3 kWh, 2.3 litres of on-site cooling water, 2.7 kg of CO2 and $1.33 of electricity at residential prices.
Which of those four numbers is solid
The money is solid, because the tariff is published. The carbon is solid to within the accuracy of a national average, which is considerable but not personal. The water depends entirely on the boundary you choose, and the range between boundaries is a thousand-fold. The energy is the most uncertain of all, because the same question answered by different models differs by more than an order of magnitude.
“The new Joule paper estimates 0.31 Wh median for standard frontier-model queries, with an interquartile range of 0.16-0.60 Wh.”
“US residential average price 18.17 cents per kWh, August 2026.”
What would change your number
Switching from ordinary text to a reasoning model matters more than doubling your usage. Using a provider with a cleaner grid matters for carbon but not for energy. Nothing you do as an individual changes the published averages, which is why this site reports ranges rather than a personal certificate.
Why a yearly view is more honest than a per-prompt one
A single prompt invites a shocking comparison. A year invites arithmetic. Once the unit is a kilowatt-hour rather than a watt-hour, the same figures that make headlines turn out to describe something a household can actually picture, which is either reassuring or disappointing depending on what you expected to find.
The interesting scale is not yours. It is the one where a few percent of the world's electricity goes to answering questions, and where the growth rate matters more than the level.