Latin America. An average person in a developed country produces around 10 tons of CO2 a year, and an increasing amount comes from the use of digital technology.
A new study from data infrastructure provider TRG Datacenters analyzed the electricity consumption and carbon emissions of common digital activities and AI applications to determine which everyday technologies leave the largest environmental footprint.
The research measured energy consumption in kilowatt-hours (kWh) and converted these figures into CO2 emissions. The analysis included everyday digital activities such as streaming, email, and video calls, along with AI applications such as chatbot queries, image generation, voice assistants, and text-to-video tools. Each activity was ranked according to its average carbon footprint to compare the environmental impact of different technologies.
YouTube streaming and Netflix tie for the top spot as the digital activities with the highest carbon footprint. Watching an hour of HD video produces 42 grams of CO2, whether on YouTube or Netflix. This is because streaming requires constant data transfer and server processing throughout that hour. This energy consumption amounts to 0.12 kWh per hour, higher than that of any other activity measured in the study. For context, if someone watches two hours of streaming a day, that adds up to more than 30 kilograms of CO2 per year.
Text-to-video generation ranks third among the technologies with the highest carbon footprint. Creating a short clip of between 6 and 10 seconds produces 17.5 grams of CO2. These tools require a lot of processing power to generate video from text descriptions, using 0.05 kWh for just a few seconds of output.
The next point in terms of carbon emissions is a one-hour Zoom call, during which 17 grams of CO₂ are generated. Video conferencing requires 0.0486 kWh per hour, as it constantly encodes, transmits, and decodes video and audio in real-time. This means that a daily one-hour work meeting can generate about 6 kilograms of CO₂ per year.
Sending a short email ranks fifth in environmental impact, generating approximately 4.7 grams of CO2 per message without attachments. Email consumes 0.0133 kWh for each message, and while a single message may seem insignificant, the billions sent daily add up. Someone sending 50 emails a day would generate approximately 85 kilograms of CO2 a year from just one email address.
AI imaging is also on the list. These tools consume 0.003 kWh to convert text descriptions into images, which means that creating an image with the AI tool produces 1 gram of CO2. Compared to video generation, this is 17 times less, but also 10 times higher than asking an AI chatbot a question.
Queries from AI-powered voice assistants rank seventh, with 0.175 grams of CO2 for each question. Voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant consume 0.0005 kWh per query. This smaller footprint is due to the fact that these systems process relatively simple commands and offer quick responses. It would take about 240 questions to reach the carbon levels of an hour of streaming video.
Google searches and AI chatbot queries share the eighth spot, both generating around 0.105 grams of CO2 per use. A single Google search consumes 0.0003 kWh, the same amount as asking a question to ChatGPT or similar chatbots. This means that someone could perform approximately 1000 chatbot searches or queries to equal an hour's worth of streaming broadcasts.
Gemini's text prompts rank last in terms of carbon footprint, with 0.084 grams of CO2 for every two prompts. This equates to 0.042 grams per indication, making it the lightest activity measured. Gemini uses 0.00024 kWh for two indications, showing that different AI models have slightly different carbon emissions.
The tech sector added approximately 900 million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere last year, a figure comparable to Germany's annual emissions, says the spokesperson for TRG Datacenters. By the end of 2025, that figure is expected to exceed 1.2 billion tonnes.
The question is not whether we use technology (that's inevitable), but how we feed it. Currently, only about 30% of data center energy comes from renewable energy. If we join forces and manage to reach 80% or 90%, we would reduce the carbon footprint of each digital activity by more than half, without anyone changing their behaviour.
For the full results of the study, click here.
