I measured the actual GPU electricity for eight local models on one RTX 3090 — and the cheapest wasn't the smallest, nor the priciest the biggest. The post How Much Does It Actually Cost to Run a Local LLM?
By Arsen Apostolov
The operational energy consumption of large language model (LLM) inference is becoming an increasingly important component of the environmental footprint of deployed AI systems. However, direct measurement of inference energy often requires hardware telemetry, power instrumentation, or infrastructure-specific monitoring, limiting its applicability in comparative studies, early-stage system design, and sustainability reporting.
arXiv:2607. 26571v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The operational energy consumption of large language model (LLM) inference is becoming an increasingly important component of the environmental footprint of deployed AI systems.
By Tina Vartziotis, Rodopi Kosteli, Elli Vartziotis, George Dasoulas, Michael Keckeisen, Konstantinos Skianis, Sotirios Kotsopoulos, Francesca Dominici
Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads are a rapidly growing contributor to data center energy consumption. Optimizing these deployments requires matching specific LLMs to the most efficient GPUs, but operators currently lack the tools to do so without exhaustively profiling each combination.
arXiv:2607. 02391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads are a rapidly growing contributor to data center energy consumption.
By Mauricio Fadel Argerich, Jonathan F\"urst, Marta Pati\~no-Mart\'inez
arXiv:2606. 23001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-device LLM inference is increasingly attractive for privacy-preserving, reliable, and cost-effective deployment, yet its energy and thermal costs remain a critical bottleneck.
By Bohua Zou, Nian Liu, Binqi Sun, Matteo Mascherin, Debayan Roy, Yutao Liu, Yu Peng, Ning Jia, Haibo Chen
arXiv:2603. 23640v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deploying large language models on-device for always-on personal agents demands sustained inference from hardware tightly constrained in power, thermal envelope, and memory.
By Pranay Tummalapalli, Sahil Arayakandy, Ritam Pal, Kautuk Kundan
arXiv:2607. 22568v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on mobile and embedded devices to improve privacy and reduce network latency.
By Ruiyi Tao, Xiaolong Tu, Haoxin Wang
arXiv:2606. 13747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate power estimation is important for understanding and optimizing CPU power behavior, yet practical workflows often rely on simulation-derived information or post-silicon analysis.
By Honghua Zhu, Chunjie Luo, Jianfeng Zhan
arXiv:2511. 07885v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) queries are predominantly processed by frontier models in centralized cloud infrastructure.
By Jon Saad-Falcon, Avanika Narayan, Hakki Orhun Akengin, J. Wes Griffin, Herumb Shandilya, Adrian Gamarra Lafuente, Medhya Goel, Rebecca Joseph, Shlok Natarajan, Etash Kumar Guha, Shang Zhu, Ben Athiwaratkun, John Hennessy, Azalia Mirhoseini, Christopher R\'e
arXiv:2607. 05475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on mobile devices enhances privacy and reduces latency, but is severely bottlenecked by hardware inefficiency.
By Guanyu Cai, Ruiming Tian, Lang Yang, Zhouhong Ren, Jinliang Yuan, Lingkun Li, Jiliang Wang
arXiv:2608. 12915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid growth of LLM inference is shifting sustainability concerns from one-time training to continuous serving, where infrastructure decisions shape energy use, carbon emissions, water consumption, and service quality.
By Nicoletta Tsiopani, Moysis Symeonides, George Pallis, Marios D. Dikaiakos