# The SIMPLE Law for Energy Cost of LLM Inference > Source: > Published: 2026-11-05 17:00:08+00:00 Generative AI is billed per token, yet tokens are not equally expensive. Each token enters the KV-cache and raises the cost of those that follow, so energy grows non-linearly along a sequence whose tokens look identical. No analytical model states what a token costs, and the most accurate SOTA model