Sam Altman says AI queries now use up to 100,000 times less energy

Speaking at ADIPEC in Abu Dhabi, the OpenAI chief paired big efficiency claims with a warning that energy remains AI's biggest constraint OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the energy cost of a single AI query has collapsed. By his estimate, queries now use somewhere between 1,000 and 100,000 times less energy than they did three to four years ago. He said it at an oil and gas conference, flanked by an announcement with a national oil company. What Altman actually said The remarks came at the ADIPEC energy conference in Abu Dhabi on November 2, 2026. Altman credited the drop in per-query energy to the development of more efficient AI models. His phrasing was looser than the headline numbers suggest. Queries are now “thousands or hundreds of thousands of times maybe more efficient” than a few years back, he said. Note the “maybe.” It carries real weight in that sentence, and the range itself spans two full orders of magnitude. Altman did not frame this as a victory lap, though. He told the audience that energy is the primary challenge facing the AI industry. Cheaper queries, far more of them The reason both claims can be true at once comes down to demand. Per-query efficiency has improved, ...