Amid rising concerns over the power demands of artificial intelligence, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has pushed back against claims that AI systems consume excessive energy. Speaking at a media platform event on February 20 during the India-AI Impact Summit 2026, Altman argued that energy comparisons between humans and AI are often misleading. He said it is reasonable to compare the energy used by ChatGPT to answer a question with the lifetime energy a 20-year-old human has consumed to respond to a similar query.
Altman said many debates focus unfairly on “how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query.” He added, “But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.” In his view, a fair test is: “If you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way.”
Responding to a question referencing Bill Gates about whether 1 ChatGPT query equals 1.5 iPhone battery charges, Altman said, “There’s no way it’s anything close to that much.” He also said artificial general intelligence feels “pretty close at this point,” adding, “Given what I know to be a faster takeoff, I expect [artificial] superintelligence is not that far off.” His comments come as AI data centres face scrutiny for high energy use and rising electricity costs. In January, the Trump administration and several US state governors signed a pact requiring tech firms to fund new power plants on the PJM grid, which supplies electricity to data centres.
Addressing water usage, Altman said concerns were “totally fake” because “we used to do evaporative cooling in data centres.” He dismissed claims like, “Don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for each query” as “completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality.” However, he admitted total energy consumption is a valid concern and said the world must move quickly toward nuclear, wind and solar energy. Altman also rejected space-based data centres, calling them “ridiculous” due to high launch costs and maintenance challenges. His remarks come as India aims to become a global data centre hub with investment commitments exceeding US $200 billion over the next decade.
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