The AI industry has converged on a deceptively simple metric: cost per token. It’s easy to understand, easy to compare, and easy to market. Every new system promises to drive it lower. Charts show steady declines, sometimes dramatic ones, reinforcing the impression that AI inference is rapidly becoming cheaper and more efficient. But simplicity, in … Read more
Walk into any modern AI lab, data center, or autonomous vehicle development environment, and you’ll hear engineers talk endlessly about FLOPS, TOPS, sparsity, quantization, and model scaling laws. Those metrics dominate headlines and product datasheets. If you spend time with the people actually building or optimizing these systems, a different truth emerges: Raw arithmetic capability … Read more
From 2005 to 2017—the pre-AI era—the electricity flowing into U.S. data centers remained remarkably stable. This was true despite the explosive demand for cloud-based services. Social networks such as Facebook, Netflix, real-time collaboration tools, online commerce, and the mobile-app ecosystem all grew at unprecedented rates. Yet continual improvements in server efficiency kept total energy consumption … Read more