Electricity is about 3% of their total operating cost, so, yes.

hylaride 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

There is no way it's 3% if they're getting electricity from the grid, even if they get their cooling from somewhere else (eg lake/river water or outside air in winter). Median DCs are anywhere from 25-40% (depending on the jurisdiction's electricity costs and how much cooling they need). Hypercaler datacenters tend to be even more dense than the median traditional ones.

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FuriouslyAdrift 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Energy is the largest OPEX by far (70-80%)... taxes second.

https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-datacenter-cost-breakdown

	▲	cyanydeez 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Anyone who puts a local model on a GPU understands how much heat they produce. Its amusing watching cloud AI users struggle to grasp even direct impacts of their use.

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fedecaccia 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The cost of electricity is (almost) negligible compared to the cost of having GPUs sitting idle. Electricity from fuel cells can be twice as expensive, but even then, it represents only about an extra ~15% of the amortization cost associated with keeping the GPU hardware idle.

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pjc50 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That seems surprising - source? What's the other 97%? Does this include ops staff?

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nomorewords an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Without having done any research at this point I would assume it's mostly the amortized cost of hardware - GPUs, memory etc

	▲	pjc50 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That's capex not opex!

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doikor an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The stuff inside the buildings (servers, switches, storage, cooling, etc) basically the stuff using the electricity and salaries/sub contractors (in addition to some techs handling the servers think security, cleaning, storage management, receiving shipments of new hardware, etc). Some taxes (depends a lot where)

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simon-b an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I saw a breakdown (don't have on hand sorry) where server depreciation was by far the majority. Power was the largest cash opex, probably matching your intuition.

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walthamstow an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Electricity is only 3% of opex for a data centre?