It costs millions of dollars to be polite to AI.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed last week that OpenAI’s electricity bill is “tens of millions of dollars” higher due to people being polite to ChatGPT.
Last week, an X user posted: “I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.” The post has been viewed 5.7 million times as of press time.
Altman replied the following day: “Tens of millions of dollars well spent—you never know.”
tens of millions of dollars well spent–you never know
— Sam Altman (@sama) April 16, 2025
A survey released in February by the publisher, Future, found that 67% of people who use AI in the U.S. are polite to the chatbot. Nearly one out of five respondents of that group (18%) stated that they say “please” and “thank you” to AI to protect themselves in case of a possible AI uprising. The remaining 82% said they were polite simply because it was “nice” to be that way to anyone, AI or human.
Being polite to AI may serve a functional purpose. Microsoft design director Kurtis Beavers noted in a Microsoft blog post that “using polite language sets a tone for the response” from AI. In other words, when you’re polite to AI, it is likely to respond in kind.
Related: New Google Report Reveals the Hidden Cost of AI
However, that politeness has an energy cost. According to a May 2024 report from The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), it takes 10 times more energy to ask ChatGPT a question or send it a comment than it takes to run a standard Google search without AI overviews summarizing results at the top of a search page.
Researchers at financial advice site BestBrokers found that ChatGPT needs 1.059 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity on average every year. That would amount to an annual expenditure of about $139.7 million on energy costs alone for the AI chatbot.
AI also requires substantial amounts of water to cool the servers that power it. Research from the University of California, Riverside shows that ChatGPT requires up to 1,408 milliliters of water, or about three 16.9-oz bottles worth, to generate a 100-word email. It takes 40 to 50 milliliters of water to generate a three-word “You are welcome” response from ChatGPT.
Related: Is ChatGPT Search Better Than Google? I Tried the New Search Engine to Find Out.
Meanwhile, OpenAI can afford the tens of millions of dollars in AI electricity costs. Earlier this month, the startup raised $40 billion at a valuation of $300 billion in the biggest private tech deal ever recorded. OpenAI noted at the time that it had 500 million global weekly users, up from 400 million in February.