Joules-to-GDP: How Much Economic Value Do AI Systems Produce per Unit of Energy?

AI systems are increasingly used to complete economically valuable tasks in various professions, such as software engineering and finance. This motivates the question: how much economic value does an AI system produce per unit of energy? To answer it, we introduce Joules-to-GDP, a framework that measures output dollar value minus AI execution cost per unit of energy, which we call Net Value per Joule (NVJ), and expert time saved per unit of energy, or Time Saving per Joule (TSJ). We then apply the framework to 220 GDPval tasks across 44 occupations. Four findings stand out. First, the most valuable work is not always the most efficient. For example, engineering work such as CAD design yields about 10% more net value per task than software development such as building websites, yet the latter yields about 27% more per joule. Second, defaulting to the most capable model can mean less total value from the same energy budget. Of the five tested models, GLM 5.2 delivers the most net value, $72.27 per task on average, using the energy of about four hours of active laptop use, while Gemma 4 31B achieves 56% of that with 23% of the energy, for 2.5x the NVJ and 2.8x the TSJ. Third, for the same model, NVJ and TSJ vary widely across different accelerators, and adding GPUs can raise energy use for modest gains: eight H100s use 3.2x the energy of one to cut completion time by only 22%, at similar net value. More capable models and more hardware must therefore earn their extra energy with enough gains in output value. Finally, the work of experts who use AI is harder for AI to match than that of experts working alone. Measured against it, GLM 5.2's NVJ falls by 70% and its TSJ by 65%. Taken together, these findings justify economic return per joule as an objective for selecting professional tasks and improving language models and accelerators, and as a basis for examining AI's effect on the economy