Google's 2x Energy Efficiency Claim Is Real — But Here's What They're Not Measuring

This is a submission for the Google I/O Writing Challenge

What I Found Building a Real Benchmark

My project — the AI GPU Energy Optimizer — measures something the industry largely ignores: what GPUs consume when they're doing nothing. We call it ghost power.

On an NVIDIA A100 SXM running on RunPod infrastructure, I measured:

Idle floor: 67W — the baseline you pay for just having the GPU allocated