[tempeler]

The accuracy of this comparison is highly speculative. One should not ignore the possibility that dominant firms in the market might be inflating their cost figures to block new entrants and extract more capital from investors through such narratives. When you compare electricity prices in China with those in the U.S., such a large gap would require a truly extraordinary breakthrough to be justified.After all, these are privately held commercial firms, and they are not obligated to disclose their financials accurately.

[jiggawatts]

Electricity is the cheapest input by far! People and large networked GPU clusters are far more expensive.

Typical models are now trained on clusters of roughly 20K GPUs. Even if you get a volume discount you still need cabling, switches, etc…

The minimum entry price to play in the game at this level is about 200-500 million dollars.

Meta spent something like $10B on their AI compute, for comparison.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Agreed. For all anyone really knows, it was 5% for OpenAI compared to Deepseek.

If you believe that Deepseek was released to undercut US AI value (duh) it makes no sense to take the official line as the absolute truth.