How much energy does Gemini 3.7 Flash use?

Google DeepMind · released 2026-08-13

Gemini 3.7 Flash uses about 0.122 Wh – 2.79 Wh of electricity to answer a typical question. That places it 219 of 266 among the models we can measure, and every figure here is calculated the same way as every other model.

A typical question

0.122 Wh – 2.79 Wh

A long, complex answer

2.86 Wh – 65.1 Wh

Capability

157.4

Energy rank

219 of 266

Human votes

1490

How capable is it, really?

The capability figure of 157.44 is a composite over 58 benchmarks — Epoch AI's Capabilities Index, which folds in software engineering, agentic tool use, long-context comprehension and creative writing as well as science reasoning. It is one number standing for a lot of separate tests, so treat a small gap between two models as noise rather than a ranking.

5,640 people have voted on it in blind head-to-head comparisons on LMArena, giving it a rating of 1490. This is the only figure here that measures whether anyone actually prefers the answers, rather than how the model scores on a test. Broken down, people rate it 1503 on coding, 1492 on creative writing, 1484 on following instructions.

What this figure is

Inferred The maker publishes no size at all, so it is inferred from how capable the model is and when it was released. A wide bracket, not a figure. Every model on this site is calculated the same way, so the comparison holds even where the absolute value carries uncertainty. Our figures are good to roughly a factor of two to three, which is why we only ever state a difference of 5× or more.

We cannot pin this one down. Google DeepMind has never published how Gemini 3.7 Flash is built, and the two plausible answers are far apart — which is why a range is shown rather than a figure. It is listed because leaving it out would reward the silence, and it is barred from every headline claim on this site.

The figure above is an understatement. Gemini 3.7 Flash generates reasoning text you never see, and that text costs energy to produce. Our calculation counts a fixed answer length, so the real figure is higher — we cannot say by how much, because the amount is not published.

Is there a better choice?

A lighter model that does the job

Nothing we track is both at least as capable as Gemini 3.7 Flash and meaningfully lighter. On our figures this is already a sensible choice for its standard of work.

What Google DeepMind publishes

Energy cannot be worked out without knowing how big a model is. Of the 27 models from Google DeepMind that we track, 18 can be assessed at all — the rest publish too little for anyone outside the company to calculate anything.

Where these figures come from

Capability and the roster come from Epoch AI, whose Capabilities Index is the 58-benchmark composite quoted above. Energy is calculated with EcoLogits and calibrated against laboratory measurements from ML.ENERGY. Human preference comes from LMArena. All four are public and free; the full method is here.

These figures are published under CC BY 4.0 — use them anywhere, including commercially, with credit to The AI Footprint.

Compare it with something

Compare Gemini 3.7 Flash with another model

Figure calculated 2026-09-20 · how these numbers are made · the full comparison of 266 models