scottcha
Joined 16 years ago
Joined 16 years ago
Regarding total costs relative to the pure energy costs it is multiple orders of magnitude different but also realize in the datacenter the energy is the pure commodity while almost every other component has huge margins driven by lack of supply. I do think over time this might get closer together (more competition on HW might lower margins) while energy might become more of a bottle neck (raising the energy prices).
Some of the items like model routing, if you do it per request instead of per session, can break down on the cloud from an energy and cost POV since one of the best things you can do for both is to maintain the KV cache which both reduces time component of energy and the quite expensive prefill energy.
I am keen on the future where we have local/cloud hybrid serving which is cache aware. I do think that could be the best use of energy resources for AI.
Hiring: 2 Engineers + Director of Sales & Operations
Energy is becoming one of the biggest constraints on AI infrastructure. Neuralwatt is building software to help datacenters get more useful AI compute and revenue from every kilowatt.
We're a VC-backed early-stage startup working on GPU optimization, AI infrastructure, energy-aware control systems, and the Neuralwatt Cloud.
$180k to $220k DOE + equity
You'll work on: Rust and Python, GPU, inference, and datacenter optimization, Production AI infrastructure, Energy-aware scheduling and control, Neuralwatt Cloud
Director of Sales & Operations
We're looking for someone with datacenter industry experience to build sales channels, partnerships, and customer relationships, support company operations, and help drive growth. Comfort using modern AI and agent tools is required.
Location: Remote-first, but you must be based in the Seattle or Denver/Boulder metro areas.
No visa sponsorship available.
To apply: [email protected] Subject: HN Hiring (<your metro>/<engineering or sales>)
Include your resume, GitHub or relevant work profile, and a short note on why you're interested in AI and energy.
The main observation when you compare to token prices our input/cached energy is much lower than the equivalent token prices while the output energy is generally higher. One of the reasons this is a bit cheaper, especially for agentic systems, is that in an fully built/cached session your input & cached to output ratio is really massive input to very small output (multiple orders of magnitude usually). The other thing we do is we actively work to optimize the system around tokens/joule with the goal of making the most energy-optimal system.
Happy to answer any other questions.
This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.
We definitely don't have any intention to obfuscate and in fact we actually try and provide more data than any other provider out there about both an individual request, as well as the fleet behavior. Since we tend to focus directly on our energy pricing and optimizing that the issue is likely where the ROI lies on energy optimization versus token optimization (totally correlated but we have other levers to reduce energy while keeping token counts the same).