Can you prove this assertion? The first page of Google results indicates energy is a greater cost than labor, with figures ranging from 60-70 percent of total operating costs.
(i owned a small web hosting company in the early 00s, and am somewhat familiar with the per sq ft cost model of colos and datacenters in general, having had to contract for space and perform part of the buildout myself)
When they gave up, they concluded that AWS's core advantage was their optimization of the electricity needed for cooling. Given that my friend's company failed to design their systems to heavily optimize for this, the cost of electricity for cooling alone didn't let them get near AWS prices without incurring significant losses. He said that if they did it again, every part of the product would have a strict heat budget.
The general disinterest in performance/efficiency work even for large scale datacenters is a major theme of Dan Luu’s writing. I’m not sure how that applies to the rest of the industry but I can attest that my company’s performance engineering team has been zeroed in every round of layoffs we’ve ever had.
The biggest players are running highly, highly efficient software.
As long as the industry is growing (it is), the opportunity cost will be high. It seems more likely it's the opposite of a self correcting problem. My 2 cents.
That doesn't necessarily mean management doesn't care about efficiency and performance, it just means they don't value the performance team (right or wrong).
Maybe your personal experience differs because you were not operating at scale? Larger scale means better negotiating over power / colo costs.