Fact check · claim about Irish data centres
false"Every AI prompt uses a bottle of water."
Verdict: false. The source paper said a 500 mL bottle per 10-50 responses for GPT-3 in 2023, counting water used at power stations too; its own Ireland row is ~70 responses per bottle, with only 0.08 mL per response used on site (Li, Mar 2025).
Checked against data built 10 October 2026 · how we check claims · corrections
The full explanation
The source paper said a 500 mL bottle per 10-50 responses for GPT-3 in 2023, counting water used at power stations too; its own Ireland row is ~70 responses per bottle, with only 0.08 mL per response used on site. Google reports 0.26 mL (five drops) per median Gemini prompt and OpenAI ~0.3 mL; long or reasoning-heavy requests use more.
Sources
| Figure | Value | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Li/Ren 'Making AI Less Thirsty' Table 1, Ireland row: 0.08 mL on-site + 7.03 mL from electricity generation; 70.4 responses per 500 mL. | 7.1 mL water per GPT-3 response (Ireland, on-site + off-site) | Li, Yang, Islam, Ren, arXiv:2304.03271v5 (Comm. ACM 2025) | 2025-03-26 (v5) |
| On-site cooling water per median Gemini text prompt ('about five drops'). | 0.26 mL water per median text prompt | Google Cloud blog, 21 Aug 2025 | 2025-08-21 |
| Sam Altman's stated average ChatGPT query energy. | 0.34 Wh per average ChatGPT query | Sam Altman, 'The Gentle Singularity' (blog) | 2025-06-10 |