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# The most energy-hungry 2025 models used up to 23 Wh per medium-length prompt
- URL: https://aiadoption.org/data/ai-model-energy-per-prompt/
- Published: 2026-10-19T14:40:40.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-21T06:01:19.000Z
- Description: Among the 15 most energy-intensive models of 2025, energy per medium-length prompt ranged from 5.1 Wh (GPT-5 mini, medium) to 23.2 Wh (DeepSeek V3.2 Exp).
- Author: Manu
- Tags: Data, AI Infrastructure, Large Language Models, #chart, #ai-index-2026, #hub-infrastructure

23.2 Wh

#1

energy per medium-length prompt for DeepSeek V3.2 Exp, the highest of the 2025 models measured

DeepSeek V3.2 Exp23.2 Wh

DeepSeek V3.223.1 Wh

GPT-5 (high)21.9 Wh

## What the chart shows

Jegham et al. (2025) estimated the energy each model uses to answer a medium-length prompt, about 1,000 tokens in and 1,000 out. Among the 15 most energy-intensive models of 2025, DeepSeek V3.2 Exp (23.2 Wh), DeepSeek V3.2 (23.1 Wh), GPT-5 at high reasoning effort (21.9 Wh) and o3-pro (21.8 Wh) used the most.

The same model can vary widely with its settings: GPT-5 used 21.9 Wh at high reasoning effort, 13.1 Wh at medium and 8.4 Wh at low. Claude 4 Opus (5.3 Wh) and GPT-5 mini at medium effort (5.1 Wh) were the lowest of these 15.

## Key numbers

| Measure           | Value    |
| ----------------- | -------- |
| DeepSeek V3.2 Exp | 23.24 Wh |
| GPT-5 (high)      | 21.85 Wh |
| GPT-5 (medium)    | 13.08 Wh |
| GPT-5 (low)       | 8.35 Wh  |
| Claude 4 Opus     | 5.32 Wh  |

## How to read it

- These are the 15 highest-energy 2025 models in the study, not all models; many lighter models use less.
- Estimates from public API latency, hardware assumptions and data centre efficiency factors, not measured power.
- The study also covers 2023 and 2024 models; download the CSV for all 33.

**Source:** [Jegham et al.](https://aiadoption.org/sources/#jegham-2025), 2025, via the AI Index Report 2026 (Stanford HAI), figure 1.4.5: *Model energy consumption for medium-length prompts*. Chart and text by AI Adoption.  
Numbers checked against the published data on 19 October 2026.  
[Download the data (CSV)](https://charts.aiadoption.org/ai-index/csv/ai-model-energy-per-prompt.csv?ref=aiadoption.org) · [Cite this chart](#source)