A few gigabytes of text is practically free to transfer even over the most exorbitant egress fee networks, but would cost “get finance approval” amounts of money to process even through a cheaper model.
Hence, a terabyte of text would cost about $42,000 to run through a pareto-frontier "cheap" model.
The most expensive cloud egress fee I could quickly find is $185 per terabyte (Azure South America Internet egress).
Hence, AI processing is 200x as expensive as bandwidth, or put another way, even a long-distance international egress at "exorbitant cloud retail pricing" is a mere 0.5% of the cost.
Petabytes, exabytes, etc... just adds digits to both the token cost and bandwidth cost in sync and won't significantly shift the ratio. If anything, bandwidth costs will go down and AI costs go up because: output tokens, smarter models, retries, multiple questions for the same data, etc...