CO₂, water, energy — visible per request.
What does your question cost the planet?
What you can't see, you can't manage. Every answer shows you a consumption readout. Not a guilty conscience — a dashboard.
Every week we read about the energy hunger and cooling-water thirst of AI models, about new data centres and even new nuclear plants just to scale AI. But how much do I actually consume? And how can I steer and shrink my own footprint?
Every AI answer uses electricity, water and CO₂ — but no provider shows how much comes out the tailpipe. And for simple questions the most powerful model often runs. “You drive the van to the ice-cream parlour around the corner — and nobody tells you a bike or your own two feet would have done the job.”
Ask a question —
and see what it costs.
Eco-Score
Every answer shows right away what it cost: CO₂ in grams, water in millilitres, energy in watt-hours — collected in the Eco-Stats panel. One of the very few AI services that makes these figures visible.
More details
Calculation: (tokens / 1000) × provider factor × model factor, based on public research (Epoch AI 2024, IEA 2024, Li et al. 2023).
What we capture per request
Three values sit behind every Eco-Score. Here's what they mean — and why the data centre's location in particular makes the difference.
CO₂
A server in France on nuclear power has a completely different footprint than one in China on coal. Exactly this difference becomes visible here — Scope 2 (purchased electricity, market-based); EU data centres consistently come out better.
GHG Protocol — Scope 2 Guidance
Water
AI data centres cool themselves with water — depending on location and season, roughly half a litre per short conversation. Modern EU sites with air cooling reduce that significantly. We show you both ends of the spectrum.
Li et al., “Making AI Less Thirsty” (CACM 2025)
Energy
An estimate of your answer's electricity use — based on model size, token count and the data centre's efficiency (PUE).
What you pay
Not just the ecological price — the financial one too. Every request shows its cost right in the chat, not in a monthly bill you didn't see coming.
Eco-Routing
By default discode picks the most frugal model that can handle your task — most requests run in the most efficient tier this way. Bike instead of van.
Eco-Slider
A slider from 1 to 5 right below the text input, exactly where you can also manually steer quality and speed with your Turntables. The higher you pull it, the more discode prioritises frugal models. How the automatic model choice works behind the scenes is shown by Smart.
The Eco-Score doesn't give exact kWh, doesn't measure Scope 3 precisely, guarantees no certified data and doesn't compute cooling water exactly — estimates based on public research and the little data the big techs hand over.
We’re on it: in a working group with ESG-Cockpit and the team behind it, we’re constantly refining meaningful impact analyses. If you have insights, data, or ideas to share, we’d love to hear from you.
Gloria Greenor
Gloria Greenor is discode’s Eco-Queen. She keeps tabs on what your AI usage costs the planet and makes sure only as much compute runs as your question actually needs. No finger-wagging — just guidance with a wink.