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Understanding how to optimize token cost requires looking at the equation for calculating cost per million tokens. In this equation, many enterprises evaluating AI infrastructure focus on the numerator: the cost per GPU per hour. For cloud deployments, this is the hourly rate paid to a cloud provider; for on-premises deployments, it’s the effective hourly cost derived from amortizing owned infrastructure. The real key to reducing token cost, however, lies in the denominator: maximizing the delivered token output. That denominator carries two business implications. Minimize token cost: When thi

The following data for the DeepSeek-R1 AI model demonstrates the difference between theoretical and actual business outcomes. Looking at compute cost alone, the NVIDIA Blackwell platform appears to cost roughly 2x more than NVIDIA Hopper — but compute cost says nothing about the output that investment buys. An analysis of mere FLOPS per dollar suggests a 2x NVIDIA Blackwell advantage compared with the NVIDIA Hopper architecture. However, the actual outcome is orders of magnitude different: Blackwell delivers more than 50x greater token output per watt than Hopper, resulting in nearly 35x lower