What compute is made of
A NVIDIA H100 SXM rents for $3.87 an hour and draws 1.96 kWh from the grid to do it. At industrial rates that electricity costs $0.17 — 4% of the price. The commodities below are real and they move; the price of compute mostly doesn’t move with them.
| Input | Latest | 30d | 1y | 180-day | As of |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Electricity, US city average A consumer average. Data centers buy at industrial and contracted rates well below it — this is the visible public benchmark, not what a provider pays. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · series · monthly | $0.197$/kWh | −0.5% | +4.2% | 2026-07-01 |
| Input | Latest | 30d | 1y | 180-day | As of |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Natural gas, Henry Hub spot Gas sets the marginal price of electricity across much of the US grid, so it moves power prices before power prices move bills — with a lag of months, through contracts. U.S. Energy Information Administration · series · daily | $2.79$/MMBtu | +2.2% | −8.5% | 2026-08-11 |
| Input | Latest | 30d | 1y | 180-day | As of |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Copper Busbar, cabling and cooling loops. It prices the building, not the hour — it reaches a rental price years later through hardware amortization. International Monetary Fund · series · monthly | $13,543$/t | −0.1% | +38.6% | 2026-07-01 | |
Aluminium Heat sinks, chassis and racks. Buildout cost, same long lag as copper. International Monetary Fund · series · monthly | $3,158$/t | −8.2% | +21.2% | 2026-07-01 |
| Input | Latest | 30d | 1y | 180-day | As of |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Crude oil, WTI Almost no data-center electricity is made from oil. Macro context, not a cost line. U.S. Energy Information Administration · series · daily | $84.77$/bbl | +17.0% | +30.4% | 2026-08-11 | |
Crude oil, Brent The international crude benchmark. Same caveat as WTI. U.S. Energy Information Administration · series · daily | $93.26$/bbl | +25.5% | +38.5% | 2026-08-11 |
Why the inputs don’t explain the price
Take everything above at today’s prices and it still accounts for a small fraction of what a GPU-hour sells for. On the H100 SXM, electricity is $0.17 and water at a generous upper bound is $0.011, leaving 95% of the price as everything else — overwhelmingly the cost of the hardware itself, spread over its working life, plus the margin a provider charges for carrying that risk. Which is why a doubling in gas does far less to a rental price than one competitor deciding to discount.
Electricity is priced at EIA Electric Power Monthly (May 2026, preliminary) and grossed up by industry-average PUE — the same sourced inputs the anatomy of a GPU-hour uses. Water has no live market price; see the note there.
Series are recorded daily from public sources and stored as published — gaps and holidays stay gaps, never carried forward. Available as JSON.