Tokens per megawatt

Plain English. How much model output a data centre produces per unit of electrical power. Chips are usually sold on speed; this metric prices them on the electricity they consume doing the work.

Why it moves money. Because power, not capital, is now the binding constraint for the biggest operators. When a company cannot get more megawatts, the only way to grow revenue is more output per megawatt — so silicon that wins on this metric wins procurement even if it loses on raw speed, and power contracts start to look like revenue guarantees. It also explains why utilities, transformer makers and cooling companies trade like AI stocks.

What to watch. Whether custom inference chips keep beating general-purpose GPUs on this measure in third-party tests, and whether operators start disclosing it. A company that reports tokens-per-megawatt is telling you what constraint it actually manages.

From the signals. OpenAI's Jalapeño ASIC was designed to the metric: power, not budget, sets the ceiling. Google's €13bn Finland commitment came with a 22-year nuclear power deal — the contract is the story.