Mixtral 8x7B Environmental Impact
Most popular open-source Mixture-of-Experts model
Energy per query
0.60 Wh
2x more than a Google search (0.3 Wh)
CO2 per query
0.03 g
Global Average grid (458 gCO₂/kWh)
Water per query
0.60 mL
~1,667 queries to fill 1 litre
Processing location
Self-hosted (varies)
Provider
Mistral AI
Category
Text / Chat
Grid carbon intensity
458 g CO2/kWh (32% renewable)
How does Mixtral 8x7B compare?
Detailed Breakdown
Energy Consumption
Mixtral 8x7B has 46.7B total parameters but only activates ~12.9B per token through its MoE architecture, giving near-GPT-3.5 quality at ~0.6 Wh per query. The MoE design means it uses far less energy than a dense 47B model would, making it an excellent efficiency/capability trade-off.
Power Source & Carbon
Fully open-source (Apache 2.0). Widely deployed on cloud and on-premises. Mistral AI's own inference runs from European data centres on relatively clean grids.
Water Usage
At ~0.6 mL per query on Mistral's French-grid reference (~1.0 L/kWh), Mixtral 8x7B has a low water footprint. The MoE architecture keeps compute — and therefore energy, CO2, and water — well below a comparably-capable dense model.
About Mixtral 8x7B
Mixtral 8x7B is an open-source text and chat model from Mistral AI, released in December 11, 2023, that runs well below the category average for energy consumption at 0.60 Wh per query. Because its weights are publicly available, it can be self-hosted on any infrastructure — meaning its carbon footprint depends entirely on where and how you choose to run it. At 46.7B parameters, it most popular open-source mixture-of-experts model.
These figures are estimates derived from hardware specifications and API benchmarks — Mistral AI has not published official energy data for Mixtral 8x7B. Actual consumption may vary significantly depending on batching, quantisation, and infrastructure optimisations that we cannot observe from outside.
Key Insights
What does your Mixtral 8x7B usage cost the planet?
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How much energy does Mixtral 8x7B use per query?
Each Mixtral 8x7B query consumes approximately 0.60 Wh of energy. This is 2x more than a traditional Google search (~0.3 Wh).
What is Mixtral 8x7B's carbon footprint?
Based on the carbon intensity of Self-hosted (varies), each query produces approximately 0.03 g of CO2. The grid in this region has a carbon intensity of 458 g CO2/kWh with 32% renewable energy.
How much water does Mixtral 8x7B use?
Each query consumes approximately 0.60 mL of water, primarily used for cooling the data centers that process the request.
How does Mixtral 8x7B compare to a Google search?
A Mixtral 8x7B query uses 2x more than a Google search in terms of energy. A Google search uses approximately 0.3 Wh, while Mixtral 8x7B uses 0.60 Wh.
Technical Details
Architecture
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (8 experts, 2 active)
Parameters
46.7B
Context window
32,000 tokens
Release date
2023-12-11
Open source
Yes
Training data cutoff
2023-12