SemiAnalysis’s AI Cloud TCO Model is a financial model for examining the economics of owning and renting out AI computing hardware. Its public product description builds a cost per GPU-hour from equipment, networking, power, datacenter space and financing, then compares that cost with rental-price scenarios. Users can vary assumptions such as hardware lifetime and debt structure to examine the resulting cash flows. Its purpose is to make the business case sensitive to explicit operating and financing assumptions. The public page describes that analytical framework; it does not provide a verified return for a particular cloud operator.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
token — The chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.
inference — Running a trained model to get answers — the phase where AI is actually used, as opposed to trained.
