New Delhi, Feb. 25 -- Two hours south of Jeddah, on Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast, the Al Shuaiba solar farm blankets 50 square kilometres of desert. The first phase of the project, started in 2024, produces 600 megawatts of electricity at just 3.9 Saudi halalas (just over a cent) per kilowatt-hour, nearly a twentieth of the cost of generation at Britain's planned Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant. Saudi Arabia's plan for all this cheap electricity is to power enormous data centres for artificial intelligence (AI).

The cost of inference, the process of querying and getting answers from an AI system, is made up of two things-the fixed cost of computer hardware, and the ongoing cost of the electricity to run it. Cutting corners on hardwar...