Your comment about watts stuck out to me. I became curious how much power we might be talking about.

I’m into Claude for $20/mo (petty bourgeois tier), let’s assume for sake of examination this is only paying for power, infrastructure already amortized

Price of grid power approx $0.15/kWh

$20 / ($0.15/kWh * 30 days) = 4.4 kWh per day.

This same amount of energy can lift a 2-ton SUV 1/2 mile into the air. To me this seems astounding.

If only half the $20 pays for power it’s still quite impressive.

Not half, only on the order of 10% of the cost of inference is electricity.