Adobe Firefly Environmental Impact

Energy Consumption

Adobe Firefly is estimated at ~3.2 Wh per image generation, comparable to other commercial diffusion models. Adobe runs a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Firefly is integrated into Photoshop, Illustrator, and Express, where quick edit operations (generative fill, expand) may use less energy than full text-to-image generation.

Power Source & Carbon

Adobe runs on a multi-cloud setup across AWS and Azure. Adobe has committed to 100% renewable electricity for its operations by 2025 and has been carbon neutral since 2021 (via offsets).

Water Usage

Estimated at ~6 mL per image, based on typical data centre WUE for Adobe's cloud providers.

How much energy does Adobe Firefly use per query?

Each Adobe Firefly query consumes approximately 3.2 Wh of energy. This is 11x more than a traditional Google search (~0.3 Wh).

What is Adobe Firefly's carbon footprint?

Based on the carbon intensity of AWS / Azure (Multi-cloud), each query produces approximately 1.0 g of CO2. The grid in this region has a carbon intensity of 450 g CO2/kWh with 25% renewable energy.

How much water does Adobe Firefly use?

Each query consumes approximately 6 mL of water, primarily used for cooling the data centers that process the request.

How does Adobe Firefly compare to a Google search?

A Adobe Firefly query uses 11x more than a Google search in terms of energy. A Google search uses approximately 0.3 Wh, while Adobe Firefly uses 3.2 Wh.

Architecture

Diffusion model (proprietary)

Release date

2023-09-13

Open source

No