Speakers · Industry & Developer
CEO · OpenAI
2 statements, June 16, 2025 to September 2, 2026. Statements appear as said, with the date and the source. No verdict is attached.
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"The average query uses about 0.34 watt hours and about 0.000085 gallons of water, roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon."
Provenance: Quoted; content date; reported from elsewhere.
Setting: Personal blog, The Gentle Singularity.
Primary source: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity (opens in a new tab).
About 38,000 ChatGPT queries use the water of one California almond; modern large data centers use about as much water as an office building; evaporative cooling has not been used in a long time. Speaker said the figure was from memory and might be wrong.
Provenance: Paraphrased; content date; reported from elsewhere.
Setting: Sources podcast with Alex Heath.
Primary source: Tom's Hardware (opens in a new tab).
Data Center Record, "Public statements by Sam Altman", https://datacenterrecord.org/speakers/sam-altman, last verified September 6, 2026.
The structured rows are CC BY-NC 4.0. Link to this page; that is what turns a reuse into a citation. Prose stays under copyright.
Last verified: September 6, 2026.
