alt Hacker NewsIn 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).
> 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.
But that’s a feedback loop that could lead to more supply being built. Or it could lead to regulations that put enormous surcharges and low limits on data center power consumers, which effectively shield consumers directly from the lack of supply. Which in turn removes the incentive for consumers to expand power generation capacity to keep up (or to allow data centers to expand it themselves).
There is enormous opposition to a new data center project 30 miles outside my city because they want to build a 1000MW natural gas power plant and a 500MW biomass plant (that will take millions of acres of forest to sustain).
If that opposition continues, I see little chance of anything but electricity cost rising as a percent of inference.