I think it is really just the difference between chemically refining something and electrically refining something.

Raw AC comes in, then gets stepped down, filtered, converted into DC rails, gated, timed, and pulsed. That’s already an industrial refinement process. The "crude" incoming power is shaped into the precise, stable forms that CPUs, GPUs, RAM, storage, and networking can actually use.

Then those stable voltages get flipped billions of times per second into ordered states, which become instructions, models, inferences, and other high-value "product."

It sure seems like series of processes for refining something.