Compute isn't a commodity: tokens per watt varies wildly across vendors
zephyr_z9 · x · 2026-11-07
Arguing against the commodity analogy: gasoline's calorific value is fixed, but tokens per watt depend on networking, PUE, chip type and inference framework — vendors get vastly different efficiency on the same hardware (e.g. DeepSeek's infra efficiency). Microsoft could also shift workloads from A100s to newer chips if models run better on Blackwell/Hopper, so treating compute pricing like oil markets is misleading.
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