AI Footprint

Reviewed 45m ago.

• tools: 4 tools scanned
• metadata: scanned

No findings.

Tools (4)

• estimate_ai_footprint

  Estimate the water (mL) and energy (Wh) used by chat-style AI prompts (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini etc.). queries_per_day: prompts per day. usage: 'simple' (text chat, ~0.34 Wh/prompt), 'mixed' (~1 Wh), 'intensive' (image generation / deep reasoning, ~3 Wh). boundary: 'onsite' (data-centre cooling only, as vendors report) or 'comprehensive' (adds water used to generate the electricity – the wider boundary most researchers use). days: number of days to total over (e.g. 250 workdays, 365). Returns per-prompt, per-day and total figures with everyday equivalents, assumptions and a source link. For agentic/coding sessions use estimate_session_footprint instead.

• get_methodology

  Return the per-prompt energy and water figures, accounting boundaries, sources, limitations, a citation line, and why published AI water estimates differ by ~100x (0.3 mL to 50 mL per prompt). Call this before explaining or citing any AI water figure.

• compare_water_use

  Convert a volume of water (mL) into everyday comparisons: teaspoons, 500 mL bottles, shower time, and lifecycle items (A4 sheet, almond, cup of tea, beef burger), plus the number of typical AI text prompts it equals. Includes the boundary caveat that lifecycle footprints are not like-for-like.

• estimate_session_footprint

  Estimate the water and energy of an AI session (e.g. an agent or coding-assistant run) from its token usage. Pass the SUM across all model calls: input_tokens (uncached prompt tokens), output_tokens (including any reasoning/thinking tokens) and cached_input_tokens (prompt-cache reads). model_class: 'small' (Haiku/mini/Flash-class), 'frontier' or 'reasoning'. Returns a central estimate and a 0.3x–3x range – this is an order-of-magnitude estimate calibrated to published per-prompt figures, not a measurement.