Yes, but for most things it's not significant.

For example Stack Overflow used to handle all their traffic from 9 on-prem servers (not sure if this is still the case). Millions of daily users. Power consumption and hardware cost is completely insignificant in this case.

LLM inference pricing is mostly driven by power consumption and hardware cost (which also takes a lot of power/heat to manufacture).

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Twirrim 5 days ago | parent [-]

> For example Stack Overflow used to handle all their traffic from 9 on-prem servers (not sure if this is still the case). Millions of daily users. Power consumption and hardware cost is completely insignificant in this case.

They just finished their migration to the cloud, unracked their servers a few weeks ago https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/07/16/the-great-unracking-sa...

	▲	jononor 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Would have loved to get some more insights. Cost estimates, before and after, for example. But also if any architectural changes where needed, or what kind of other challenges and learnings they got from the migration.