About · method and sources
A public data desk for what AI draws from the ground.
Five Drops exists because the cost of a prompt is invisible. Nobody sees the cooling tower, the evaporated litre or the kilowatt-hour behind an answer that arrives in a second. This site puts a number on it, in units people can picture, and keeps that number updated as worldwide AI demand grows.
How the figures are built
01
Per-task coefficients
Each activity carries an energy and a water figure per single task, taken from published inference measurements rather than vendor marketing.
02
Your daily counts
You enter how many searches, chats, images, videos, decks and coding prompts you run on a normal day. Nothing identifying is asked or stored.
03
Projection and comparison
Daily totals are projected across a year, converted to carbon at the global grid average, and set against shower and bottle equivalents.
The coefficients we use
These are the exact numbers behind every calculation on the site. They are modelled estimates, not audited measurements, and they are deliberately conservative where the research disagrees.
| Activity | Water (L / task) | Energy (kWh / task) |
|---|---|---|
| Search queries | 0.0015 | 0.0003 |
| Chat / text prompts | 0.02 | 0.0012 |
| Image generations | 0.2 | 0.0029 |
| Video generations | 6 | 0.1 |
| Slide / deck generations | 0.35 | 0.006 |
| Coding prompts | 0.05 | 0.0018 |
Carbon conversion: 0.42 kg CO2e per kWh, global grid average
Sources
Google environmental report, Gemini prompt footprint (2025)
Median text prompt at 0.26 mL of cooling water, roughly five drops. The figure the site is named after.
IEA, Electricity 2024 and datacenter outlook
Datacenter electricity demand, grid carbon intensity and residential consumption baselines.
Luccioni et al. (2023), Power Hungry Processing
Measured energy per inference across text, image and multimodal model classes.
Li et al. (2023), Making AI Less Thirsty
On-site cooling and off-site power-generation water intensity for AI workloads.
FAO AQUASTAT
Renewable freshwater availability and population figures used for the country comparisons.
Privacy
Entries are anonymous. We store the country you pick and the counts you type, nothing else. No account, no email, no name. Your own entry is kept in your browser so you see your result again when you return, and you can update it at any time rather than adding a duplicate. Country totals on the map are aggregates of contributor entries, not measurements of true national AI usage.
What these numbers are not
They are not a measurement of any specific company's datacenters, and they are not a verdict on whether you should use AI. Water intensity varies enormously by site, season, cooling design and local grid. The point of this ledger is scale and direction, not a decimal place.