The University of Rhode Island’s AI lab estimates that GPT-5 averages just over 18 Wh per query, so putting all of ChatGPT’s reported 2.5 billion requests a day through the model could see energy usage as high as 45 GWh.
A daily energy use of 45 GWh is enormous. A typical modern nuclear power plant produces between 1 and 1.6 GW of electricity per reactor per hour, so data centers running OpenAI’s GPT-5 at 18 Wh per query could require the power equivalent of two to three nuclear power reactors, an amount that could be enough to power a small country.
I don’t buy the research paper at all. Of course we have no idea what OpenAI does because they aren’t open at all, but Deepseek’s publish papers suggest it’s much more complex than 1 model per node… I think they recommended like a 576 GPU cluster, with a scheme to split experts.
That, and going by the really small active parameter count of gpt-oss, I bet the model is sparse as heck.
There’s no way the effective batch size is 8, it has to be waaay higher than that.