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How much energy does Kimi K2.5 use?

Moonshot · released 2026-01-27

Kimi K2.5 uses about 0.493 Wh, 4.03 Wh of electricity to answer a typical question. That places it 256 of 277 among the models we can measure, and every figure here is calculated the same way as every other model.

A typical question
0.493 Wh, 4.03 Wh
A long, complex answer
11.5 Wh, 94.1 Wh
Capability
148.0
Energy rank
256 of 277
Human votes
1445

How capable is it, really?

The capability figure of 147.98 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.

74,759 people have voted on it in blind head-to-head comparisons on LMArena, giving it a rating of 1445. 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 1474 on coding, 1422 on creative writing, 1431 on following instructions.

What this figure is

Day-one estimate  Calculated from an estimated parameter count, the maker hasn't published one. 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. Moonshot has never published how Kimi K2.5 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.

Is there a better choice?

A lighter model that does the job
Anthropic · capability 164.4. It scores higher than Kimi K2.5 on Epoch's Capabilities Index (164.45 against 147.98), the composite over 58 benchmarks that the capability figure above comes from, and uses about 5.8× less energy per answer: 5.64 Wh against 32.9 Wh. It has not faced human head-to-head voting, where Kimi K2.5 carries 74,759 votes, worth weighing.

What Moonshot publishes

Energy cannot be worked out without knowing how big a model is. Of the 6 models from Moonshot that we track, 2 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.

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Or work out what a year of using it adds up to, for you or for a whole organisation.

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Figure calculated 2026-10-17 · how these numbers are made · the full comparison of 277 models