Nicholas J. Lamb

An energy-first method for estimating the water and energy footprint of AI use (methodology 2026-10)

Published estimates of the water used by a single AI chatbot prompt differ by roughly a hundredfold, from about 0.3 mL to 50 mL. Most of that spread comes from four choices that are rarely stated together: when the measurement was made, where the accounting boundary is drawn, wha...