An article published in December 2023 claims that “Generating one image takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone”
The author references this story that states:
“In fact, generating an image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, according to a new study by researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University”
The relevant section of the study being referenced reads:
For comparison, charging the average smartphone requires 0.022
kWh of energy [51], which means that the most efficient text generation model uses as much energy as 9% of a full smartphone charge for 1,000 inferences, whereas the least efficient image generation model uses as much energy as 522 smartphone charges (11.49 kWh), or around half a charge per image generation4, although there is also a large variation between image generation models, depending on the size of image that they generate.
Note that “half a charge” applies to the least efficient image generation. The mean image generation uses approximately 13% of a phone charge:
| Item | kWh | Phone charge equivalent |
| Charge phone | 0.022 | 1 |
| Least efficient image generation | 0.002907 | 0.52 |
| Mean image generation | 0.01149 | 0.13 |