No, that's PUE - a measure of the overall efficiency of computing. Today's leading datacenters have a PUE of about 1.12, meaning 12% of their total power is spent on non-compute things (losses in electrical conversion and cooling, for the most part).

A decade ago, PUE numbers were much more commonly closer to 2, (Google's were in the 1.2-1.3 range even in 2008, but things had improved quite a bit since 2005 already, and MSFT and YHOO were working on it), but modern datacenter design has improved that substantially.

see, e.g., https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal...

This is a strange figure. If 12% of power is used on non-compute things, what is the other 88% of power converted into? The computed information?

In my understanding, 100% of the power consumed is converted to heat. Measuring efficiency should have a unit like Gigaflops per Megawatt or something, not a fictional percentage. That way you can also account for hardware getting more energy efficient over time, which is now just barely represented in the numbers. It's hard to get a right unit though, because for instance archive.org has a big data center but focuses on storage instead of processing power.

I'm not sure how much, but some of the energy is transformed into the electromotive force that literally pushes metal molecules around in the circuitry of your pc, so it can't be 100% heat.

Almost entirely heat. the reason pue is separate from the efficiency of the computation is mostly because one is a datacenter engineering question. You can improve them independently.

Gflops per watt is also really important, but that's more in Intel/and/Nvidia's hands.

Application ops/w is also also important, and that combines the system efficiency and the code efficiency.

A key thing is that each of these evolves on different time scales. When you build a datacenter it lasts for multiple generations of processors. Hence PUE.