Feeling guilty about ChatGPT's water use? Sam Altman says 38,000 queries is equal to one California almond

The public’s discovery of AI’s water problem was, fittingly, a watershed moment, prompting viral videos and headlines claiming that nearly every query necessitates an entire 500mL bottle of H2O.

But, OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman, who some may want to consider one of the horsemen of the apocalypse, wants us all to realize that in a world rife with over-consumption, it’s all relative — and, in fact, that something as mundane as eating almonds may be worse for the environment than a conversation with his company’s ChatGPT.

38,000 prompts or a single almond — it’s all the same amount of water

In a newly-released conversation with business journalist Alex Heath, Altman talked all about where he sees the future of both OpenAI and computer intelligence more generally, which included touching on some of the negative buzz like the water topic.

He stated the belief that there is widespread use of evaporative cooling in data centers is a misconception that has been “difficult to disprove,” claiming that, counter to common opinion, modern hyperscaler facilities actually only use “the equivalent amount of water as an office building.” Even more, Altman claimed that even tens of thousands of conversations with ChatGPT wouldn’t demand the amount of water required to grow a single California almond.

“I don’t have the exact calculation in front of me, but I think the real number is something like, for every 38,000 ChatGPT queries, that is the same amount of water that is used in the production of a single almond in California,” he said.

“The people that are scarfing down 12 almonds at a time don’t feel like they’re doing something horrible from a water perspective.”

Indeed, the almond industry has been revealed to be a big water glutton in recent years, with some deciding almond milk in particular is definitively “out” due to its negative environmental impact, primarily through the 1.1 gallons of water needed to produce just one nut in The Golden State.

Hate data centers? Then stop using AI — but is that even possible?

What’s interesting is that Altman directed his comments to AI antagonists who “won’t use ChatGPT on principle,” and yes, there are a lot of them.

But despite all of the public outcry against data centers in particular, some 900 million people around the world still use ChatGPT weekly, churning out 2.5 billion prompts each day, whether they want to admit it or not — and that’s to say nothing of the 1.5 billion monthly who engage with it and/or comparable AI tools like Claude.

To be fair, though, the U.S. is considered quite far behind other nations as far as consumer use of the tech is concerned, with 2026 adoption estimates ranging from 31.3% of the American working-age population to 56% of American adults with internet access. Naturally, digitally native generations have more habitual use, with about one in three U.S. residents aged 18 to 49 believed to employ large language models on a daily basis, per one Pew Research poll from earlier this year.