What compute is made of
A NVIDIA H100 SXM rents for $4.07 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.
- Electricity, US city average$0.196$/kWh30d +0.0%1y +4.3%
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
- Natural gas, Henry Hub spot$3.10$/MMBtu30d +4.4%1y +3.7%
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
- Copper$14,473$/t30d +1.0%1y +44.8%
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
- Aluminium$3,283$/t30d +1.0%1y +23.7%
Heat sinks, chassis and racks. Buildout cost, same long lag as copper.
International Monetary Fund · series · monthly
- Crude oil, WTI$107.89$/bbl30d +6.4%1y +84.9%
Almost no data-center electricity is made from oil. Macro context, not a cost line.
U.S. Energy Information Administration · series · daily
- Crude oil, Brent$115.22$/bbl30d −3.7%1y +89.8%
The international crude benchmark. Same caveat as WTI.
U.S. Energy Information Administration · series · daily
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 96% 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.