Here's how much energy does single Google AI search consumes?

Google, an Alphabet-owned company is substantially one of the most popular search engines which receives billions of searches every day and it has recently debuted the latest search engine which is known as AI Overviews.

Statista reported that the Alphabet-owned company averaged approximately 8.5 billion searches per day in 2023, or 98,379 searches per second. Further reports by Gizmodo suggested it would lead to an excessive consumption rate of approximately 295,138.88 watt-hours, or 295.14 kilowatt-hours per second.

Additionally, an average electric vehicle sold in 2024 consumed approx 40-kilowatt per hour battery which signifies that an AI search utilises almost seven and a half average electric cars just in a single search.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) search results consume approximately ten times the energy to power them as a traditional Google search. But, according to Digiconomist, AI-generated results for every Google search would consume immense amounts of energy which would be approximately up to the energy usage of the entire Ireland because every search takes three watts per hour, which sounds quite less but, actually it’s not.

However, AI has been constantly evolving and it has also significantly influenced the user experience, but forced users to express concerns about the efficiency and reliability of search results generated by Google AI.