There is no cloud, there is a building

There is no cloud. There is a building. Rows of machines in a warehouse, in a place chosen because the electricity is cheap and there is enough of it, running hot enough that a large part of the building exists only to carry the heat away.

Every question you type is a few seconds of that building, and someone is paying for those seconds. One question is nothing. Everyone asking all day is a real amount of a city's power, which is why these buildings are now an argument in places that have never thought about them before.

The building has to be built first, and buildings that need that much power take years. The machines arrive fast. The power line does not.