Power is not the most expensive part of data center lifetime cost; especially these days when you're filling them with several billion dollars of nvidia chips. It's still an important consideration of course, but not the only one.

▲

jeffbee 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know if that's really true. Given realistic life cycles of equipment (~10 years, not 3 as commonly believed) the operating power is going to be 75-80% of the TCO, or more.

▲

jsnell 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't see how that number could possibly be realistic.

A H100 cost 30k when new, and uses 500W of power.

500W for a year is about 4500kWh, which at $0.10/kWh is $450/year if run at full utilization (unrealistic).

TCO of an AI data center should be entirely dominated by capex depreciation.

	▲	creddit 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In fairness your calculation looks at the most expensive element of the DC but ignores all of the associated parts required to utilize the H100: CPU, memory, cooling, etc. No to say that that flips the calculation (I don't have the answer), but it does leave a lot of power out.