Energy-wise, the European alternative is more likely to be closer to sustainable. Also, the water stress may look different in some European countries. Scandinavia has been experimenting a lot with transferring heat from data centers to district heating systems. I don't think they would care much about that in US (you need district heating, first of all...).

Solidagent is a good in-between option, they run global state-of-art "open source" models on EU-located servers. Regardless how open they are, models like Deepseek are much more sustainable to walled gardens of Big Tech (not to mention that Deepseek actually used less resources to achieve similar performance).

And as others said, MistralAI also works well.

Neither

Global warming is global. Accelerate it at your own risk.

Just run local models at home.

don't use AI, it's a scam

Your data is more valuable to them than water and energy

Use a European AI, like Mistral - or Ollama, Llamafile and so on.

Your data will then at least be stored in Europe, in case of spying. And GDPR > USA.

Your interactions will generally be stored and used for further training, so using their services gives them an advantage compared to European companies. I would suspect, although I have not read about this in detail, that the plan for eventual monetisation, once they have a monopoly and people are dependent and unable to switch back, will be to generate a profile and use this for targeted advertising/influencing, similar to how social network services operate. IMO it's much better not to use their services, they want the data more than they care about electricity bills.

The American ones have AI farms in Europe.

Training GPTs takes a lot of water and energy, running them doesn't take massive amounts.