I was not talking about costs to the data center operator. I was talking about what the cloud customers pay. If you're insinuating that 40% of cloud service pricing is electricity, surely that must be a cloud service operating at a major loss because only a small fraction of a cloud service cost is the data center cost.
I am not insinuating that. I am arguing that a major part of a data center costs is electricity, and that an important percentage of what cloud customers pay comes from that data center cost. My comment was clear that was not the only cost for cloud providers.
The thing is, price tags for cloud services are so much higher than what data center costs would be for hosting an equivalent service yourself that I doubt that the electricity rate difference would make a cloud service in Germany outright uncompetitive. What is 40% in data center cost may very well be <10% in cloud service pricing.
"Data Center Power Costs":
"...In a data center, typically 20-40 % of the operating cost is related to data center power costs..."
https://greenmountain.no/2020/07/01/data-center-power-costs/
Also in the article above there this bar chart: https://greenmountain.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Cost-of-...
were once more Germany costs for electricity are so much higher than anybody else.
"How Much Does it Cost to Power One Rack in a Data Center?":
https://www.nlyte.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-power-on...
"...The energy cost to power a single server rack in a data center in the US can be as high as almost $30,000 a year, depending on its configuration. In a data center with 100 cabinets, the cost to power those racks each year can be over $3 million. Data center professionals need to ensure that they are correctly monitoring energy consumption and efficiently managing capacity..."