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You can assume the API price is roughly proportional to electricity usage.

If you buy $10 in tokens, that probably folds into ~$3 to $5 dollars in electricity.

Which would be around 30 to 90 kWhr in electricity.

Depending on the source, it could be anywhere from ~500g/kWhr (for natural gas) and ~24g/kWhr for hydroelectric.

It's a really wide spread, but I'd say for $10 in tokens, you'd probably be in the neighbourhood of 1 kg to 40 kg of emissions.

What's a good thing is that a lot of the spread comes from the electricity source. So if we can get all of these datacenters on clean energy sources it could change emissions by over an order of magnitude compared to gas turbines (like XAi uses).



if you bought a nvidia h100 at wholesale prices (around $25k) and ran it 24/7 at commercial electric rates (lets say $0.1 per kwh), then it would take you over 40 years to spend the purchase price of the gpu in electricity. Maybe bump it down to 20 for data center cooling.

I don't think the cost of the ai is close to converging to the price of power yet. Right now its mostly the price of hardware and data center space minus subsidies.


I don’t think that you can make this assumption.

People are selling AI at a loss right now.




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