Energy Costs of Communicating with AI

Maximilian Dauner^*Gudrun Socher^*

• Munich University of Applied Sciences, Munich, Germany

This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of the environmental cost of large language models (LLMs) by analyzing their performance, token usage, and CO2 equivalent emissions across 14 LLMs ranging from 7 to 72 billion parameters. Each LLM was tasked with answering 500 multiple-choice and 500 free-response questions from the MMLU benchmark, covering five diverse subjects. Emissions were measured using the Perun framework on an NVIDIA A100 GPU and converted through an emission factor of 480 gCO2/kWh. Our results reveal strong correlations between LLM size, reasoning behavior, token generation, and emissions. While larger and reasoning-enabled models achieve higher accuracy, up to 84.9\%, they also incur substantially higher emissions, driven largely by increased token output. Subject-level analysis further shows that symbolic and abstract domains such as Abstract Algebra consistently demand more computation and yield lower accuracy. These findings highlight the trade-offs between accuracy and sustainability, emphasizing the need for more efficient reasoning strategies in future LLM developments.