Strange. I read James' blog (I even linked to it). And I remember posts demonstrating the reverse, that the cost of servers was not dominant in large-scale data centers, but dominant only in medium- and small-scale data centers (think typical enterprise data centers). James was using this data to explain why it made sense for enterprises to benefit from large-scale cost savings by moving to EC2.

Anyway, this does not change my point that the EC2 hourly prices are so high that they eclipse both power & cooling as well as server costs for Amazon.