What formula does this use?

Energy in kWh equals chip power in kW times number of chips times hours times PUE. Emissions equal that energy times the grid carbon intensity. This mirrors the methodology in Strubell et al. (2019) and Patterson et al. (2021), which both multiply hardware power draw by run time, PUE, and grid intensity.

What is PUE and what value should I use?

Power Usage Effectiveness is the ratio of total facility energy to the energy delivered to the IT equipment. A perfect data centre is 1.0; the global average is around 1.55, while best-in-class hyperscale facilities reach 1.1. Use your provider's reported figure if you have it.

Where do I get grid carbon intensity?

Grid intensity is grams of CO2e per kWh and varies hugely by region and time. Coal-heavy grids exceed 600 g/kWh, the global average is around 480 g/kWh, and low-carbon grids like France, Sweden, or Quebec can be under 60 g/kWh. Tools like Electricity Maps publish live figures.

How accurate is the estimate?

It is a first-order estimate. Real consumption depends on chip utilisation, memory and networking overhead, idle time, and embodied hardware emissions, none of which are captured here. Treat the number as an order-of-magnitude guide, not a certified figure for reporting.

Why benchmark against GPT-3 and BERT?

Published estimates give a sense of scale: training GPT-3 is estimated at roughly 552 tonnes CO2e and the original BERT at roughly 0.65 tonnes (about the same as a few transatlantic flights). Comparing your run to these anchors makes an abstract kilogram figure intuitive.

AI Model Training Carbon Estimator

Training large models consumes a lot of electricity, and the resulting carbon depends heavily on where and when you train. This estimator turns your hardware and run details into a CO2e figure using the same multiply-through approach used in the widely cited Strubell et al. and Patterson et al. papers.

How it works

The calculation chains four multipliers:

power_kW   = chip_TDP_watts × chips / 1000
energy_kWh = power_kW × hours × PUE
emissions  = energy_kWh × grid_gCO2e_per_kWh   (grams)
tonnes     = emissions / 1,000,000

PUE scales the IT load up to the whole facility (cooling, power conversion), and the grid intensity converts energy into carbon. Default accelerator power draws use published board TDPs: A100 ≈ 400 W, H100 ≈ 700 W, V100 ≈ 300 W, and a TPU v4 chip ≈ 200 W.

Example and notes

Running 256 A100s for 300 hours at PUE 1.1 on a 400 g/kWh grid uses about 256 × 0.4 kW × 300 h × 1.1 ≈ 33,800 kWh and emits roughly 13.5 tonnes CO2e — about 2.4% of the estimated GPT-3 footprint. Move that same run to a 50 g/kWh low-carbon grid and emissions fall to under 1.7 tonnes, which shows why region choice often matters more than raw efficiency. This is a planning estimate; it omits chip utilisation, networking, idle time, and embodied hardware carbon.