alt Hacker NewsPower generation is also extremely expensive ongoing - either through gas turbines that eat fuel or on-grid power that datacenters will need to pay to capitalize (depending on ratepayer agreements of course - but clearly people aren’t stoked about subsidizing these)
In aggregate it’s a lot of electricity, enough to impact local grid markets.
But as a fraction of inference revenue, there is good reason to estimate that the direct electricity costs are perhaps 1-5% of inference revenue.
That’s a lot, but hypothetically if electricity prices double, it’s more likely to lead to angry residential consumers than a doubling of inference token prices.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, November 2026: https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2026-11...
There are substantial economies of scale on both power generation (grid-scale) and inference power consumption (batching and utilization).