Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Multi-campus AI data centers procure identical hardware and service SKUs across geographically heterogeneous locations, yet finance and operations require a single system-level benchmark (“world price”) per SKU for budgeting, chargeback, and capacity planning. Naive deployment-weighted aggregation preserves total cost but can induce Simpson-type aggregation bias, where heterogeneous location mixes reverse global SKU rankings and weaken managerial decision signals. This study formalizes the problem of location-robust, cost-preserving aggregation and develops two mathematically structured operators for production cost pipelines. The first operator applies a two-way fixed-effects decomposition to separate global SKU effects from campus-specific premia, followed by normalization to guarantee exact cost preservation. This yields an interpretable benchmark that performs well when campus coverage is sufficiently broad and location effects remain approximately additive. The second operator solves a constrained convex common-weight optimization, producing a unified set of non-negative campus weights that preserves total cost while providing the strongest protection against dominance reversals in the ordered setting. Simulation experiments and a semi-real calibrated AI datacenter OPEX illustration show that both operators substantially improve ranking stability relative to naive blending, while the convex operator serves as the more conservative safeguard under adverse heterogeneity. The resulting detect–correct–validate workflow provides a scalable decision-support framework for robust cost aggregation in distributed AI infrastructure and illustrates how symmetry-preserving aggregation operators can stabilize benchmarking in large heterogeneous systems.
Source: Symmetry
DOI: 10.3390/sym18040690
Author: Qi He
Language: English
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,896
OpenAlex ID: W4417466899