CarbonWatch
carbon footprint of AI use, across all machines
Sum of the estimates voluntarily reported by CarbonWatch installations that turned sharing on. This is an aggregated order of magnitude, not a measurement: every figure inherits the uncertainty of the estimation model described below.
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What that amounts to
The total above, converted into familiar things. Every reference is named with its assumption: "a petrol car" means nothing — a city car and a sports car are a factor of three apart.
Energy
Carbon
Orders of magnitude, per passenger and per kilometre for transport. They feed no calculation on this page: they only help read it. Occupancy changes everything — a half-empty ship doubles each passenger's share, a packed train halves it.
By day
Last thirty days. Amber for online services, green for local models.
- online services
- local models
By kind of use
What the energy is spent on, rather than who profits from it. Five categories cross the anonymity threshold far sooner than any single service: this is where the structure of use shows up first.
By service
A service only appears once 5 distinct installations have reported it: below that, the page would tell you about a handful of people's usage.
Local models
Counted separately: their energy is the host machine's, which nothing makes comparable from one computer to the next.
—Declared electricity grids
The carbon intensity each installation selected in its settings.
Methodology
Online services are billed on bytes received, capped at a model's maximum generation rate and floored to discard protocol noise. Local models are billed on inference time. Energy is converted to CO₂e using the electricity grid chosen on each machine.
The most uncertain parameter remains the ratio between bytes on the wire and tokens produced. Factors are adjustable on each machine, so two installations may estimate the same usage differently. The totals above inherit that.
What is reported, and what is not
Sharing is off by default and turned on explicitly in the settings. A machine that turns it on sends, per hour and per service: estimated energy, CO₂e, estimated tokens, service type, electricity grid code and application version.
Never reported: IP address, machine name, process name, detected application, visited address, content. No account. The installation identifier is a random number tied to nothing and no one, and the application can erase every trace of it.