[oefrha]

Are you speaking from experience doing data center asset management or are you just speculating? I don’t know about data centers, but for colocation, electricity cost is far from a rounding error. Also, cooling is a major factor that is directly related to power consumption, as pointed out by siblings.

[easygenes]

See [1], figure 1 there is a fairly typical data center costs breakdown at the highest level for TCO. Total energy is by far the lowest, at around 10-15%. Site infrastructure, IT infrastructure, and staff are the real cost priorities.

There's a caveat to that in the planning phase of a data center: A lot of the site infrastructure costs are a function of the total power requirement. So if - when building out a data center - you can get more power efficiency, then that does translate to a significant cost savings.

Cooling tends to be somewhere between a 20 and 60% add on to the direct power consumption of a server.

  1: https://www.missioncriticalmagazine.com/ext/resources/MC/Home/Files/PDFs/(TUI3011B)SimpleModelDetermingTrueTCO.pdf