Let's use an example of a GW AI deployment.
At $0.07/kWh, that costs $70,000 every hour in just electricity. $1.7 million /day. $613 million /year.
I had claude estimate the GPU cost of such a deployment:
> To get racks per GW: a full NVL72 rack draws roughly 130-132 kW under full load. If a 1 GW facility runs ~715 MW of IT power (after a ~1.4 PUE for cooling), that's on the order of 4,000–4,500 racks. At $3.4M of compute hardware each, the GPU-system cost lands around $14–15 billion.
15 billion / 613 million / year = ~24.5 years til electricity costs catch up to the GPUs. Obviously electricity isn't 100% of OpEx, but I'd expect it to be the majority for AI deployments.
Regardless, if you can cut the $613 million/yr in half that's still massive savings.