The first two are merely input metrics. Optimizing for inputs while the business runs on output is a fundamental mismatch.

Cost per token determines whether enterprises can profitably scale AI. It’s the one TCO metric that directly accounts for hardware performance, software optimization, ecosystem support and real-world utilization — and NVIDIA delivers the lowest cost per token in the industry.

Understanding how to optimize token cost requires looking at the equation for calculating cost per million tokens.

In this equation, many enterprises evaluating AI infrastructure focus on the numerator: the cost per GPU per hour. For cloud deployments, this is the hourly rate paid to a cloud provider; for on-premises deployments, it’s the effective hourly cost derived from amortizing owned infrastructure. The real key to reducing token cost, however, lies in the denominator: maximizing the delivered token output.