Token impact calculator
Estimate the full lifecycle footprint — manufacturing and operation — of your tokens in the cloud versus on a local machine: electricity, CO2, water and mineral resources, based on published research figures.
All constants and their references are detailed in the article explaining the energy cost of a cloud or local token
Per-token draw including multi-user batching.
Whole-machine draw under inference load.
Lifecycle impact
Electricity (lifecycle)Electricity covers the whole lifecycle: the draw per 1,000 tokens scaled to your token count, plus the manufacturing of the hardware amortized over its life. The cloud figure also applies a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of 1.2 for cooling and power distribution, then both paths add an embodied share of about 25% for GPU and server production (LLMCarbon).
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cloud
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local
Carbon (grid mix)Carbon is the lifecycle electricity consumed multiplied by the carbon intensity of the selected grid mix, in kg CO₂e per kWh. A low-carbon grid such as France's divides the footprint by roughly two compared with the world average.
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cloud
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local
Water (cooling + generation)The local figure is not zero: generating your household electricity also consumes water offsite, in the power plant (about 1.5 L per kWh in a nuclear/hydro mix). The cloud adds 0.5 L per kWh of onsite cooling water on top of it, for a modern French air or closed-loop data centre (Li et al., 'Making AI Less Thirsty').
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cloud
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local
Minerals (resource depletion)Mineral resources are measured by abiotic depletion potential (ADPe), in mg of antimony equivalent (Sb eq). Producing an AI graphics card depletes ~10 mg Sb eq, amortized over the card's life and the tokens it serves. The cloud concentrates that burden on dedicated accelerators renewed every 3–5 years, while a local machine you already own adds no new hardware (Morand et al., 'The Rising Unsustainability of AI Graphics Cards Production').
–µg Sb eq means micrograms of antimony equivalent (Sb is the chemical symbol for antimony). It is the unit of abiotic resource depletion: all extracted metals are converted into an equivalent amount of antimony, the reference metal chosen for its rarity. 1,000 µg = 1 mg.
cloud
–µg Sb eq means micrograms of antimony equivalent (Sb is the chemical symbol for antimony). It is the unit of abiotic resource depletion: all extracted metals are converted into an equivalent amount of antimony, the reference metal chosen for its rarity. 1,000 µg = 1 mg.
local
Orders of magnitude only. The figures cover the full lifecycle (manufacturing + operation) but real footprints vary with model size, batching, utilization, cooling technology, hardware lifespan and grid mix.