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Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

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Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#11

Post by tw04 »

mym1990 wrote: post #6

Isn't the mid/late game of all of these alternative clouds going to be the same as the big cloud players...get customer lock in and then prices slowly creep up until its kind of a wash?

Not every vendor needs Amazon’s eye watering margins to justify their existence. Plenty of people more than happy to make their 12% and call it a day. The difficulty and cost of owning a data center has been grossly exaggerated. It’s just that bean counters would rather lease because it’s easier to massage the numbers than dealing with a depreciating asset.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#12

Post by 1123581321 »

mym1990 wrote: post #6

Isn't the mid/late game of all of these alternative clouds going to be the same as the big cloud players...get customer lock in and then prices slowly creep up until its kind of a wash?

Not without some distinctive advantage to the provider's infrastructure beyond raw GPU access. Plus, as more options exist, more SDKs will facilitate switching or distributing workloads to multiple providers as de facto connection standards emerge (like what's happened to S3-compatible storage, as a simple example.)

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#13

Post by yardie »

freeqaz wrote: post #2

How are these companies even getting these GPUs? I would imagine NVIDIA would give them all to Microsoft and Google if they are in short supply.

Nvidia is a shovel maker. If you only have 1-2 shovel buyers, buyers who've started on making their own shovels in-house, then you run the risk of being trapped in a monopsony. You lose 1 shovel buying client and then you might be insolvent before too long.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#14

Post by zer00eyz »

rvba wrote: post #4
freeqaz wrote: post #2

How are these companies even getting these GPUs? I would imagine NVIDIA would give them all to Microsoft and Google if they are in short supply.

Why couldnt NVIDIA auction some to get best price? I mean locking customers long term is probably better, but a certain % of product still vould be sold for a spot price? This made me wonder what is the optimum split on that - obviously depends on your market placement, but isnt nvidia basically a monopoly now?

> Why couldnt NVIDIA auction some to get best price?

Have you seen their pricing? They are robbing everyone and selling out quickly. I don't think "auctions" are going to add much to thee bottom line.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#15

Post by more_corn »

tw04 wrote: post #11
mym1990 wrote: post #6

Isn't the mid/late game of all of these alternative clouds going to be the same as the big cloud players...get customer lock in and then prices slowly creep up until its kind of a wash?

Not every vendor needs Amazon’s eye watering margins to justify their existence. Plenty of people more than happy to make their 12% and call it a day. The difficulty and cost of owning a data center has been grossly exaggerated. It’s just that bean counters would rather lease because it’s easier to massage the numbers than dealing with a depreciating asset.

Amazon has also spent decades and tons of money building out the ecosystem of AWS: Ebs, alb, rds, etc. You don’t need any of that stuff for training. You just need gpus. If you don’t need it don’t pay for it.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#16

Post by 015a »

We're absolutely seeing the same thing even in non-GPU traditional servers. Here is an estimated monthly cost breakdown for a new GCP instance type, the n4-standard-2, in us-central1:

    2 vCPU + 8 GB memory: $69.18
    10 GB Hyperdisk Balanced: $0.80
    3060 provisioned IOPS: $15.30
    155 MB/s provisioned throughput: $6.20
    Total: $91.48
Like, you can tear apart that $69/mo for 2vCPU + 8gb of memory, no problem. That's utterly insane. Its Emerald Rapids, so you're paying a premium for new chips, whatever. You can also tear apart the network egress, obviously.

But just look at the SSD pricing. That's a ten gigabyte SSD provisioned for 155MB/s, for $22/month. You can go just outright buy a 256gb NVME at significantly higher bandwidth on Amazon for like $25, flat. The n4 tier instances removed the ability to use their cheaper general-purpose SSDs; you have to use hyperdisks.

I'd be surprised if we don't see the big cloud providers start struggling over the next ten years. I think they engineered planetary-scale systems that are just way too expensive and complex to justify the cost they're charging; ZIRP phenomena.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#18

Post by TheGRS »

mym1990 wrote: post #6

Isn't the mid/late game of all of these alternative clouds going to be the same as the big cloud players...get customer lock in and then prices slowly creep up until its kind of a wash?

I would think the late game would be getting bought out by AWS/G Cloud/Azure.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#19

Post by jedberg »

freeqaz wrote: post #2

How are these companies even getting these GPUs? I would imagine NVIDIA would give them all to Microsoft and Google if they are in short supply.

I head up Product at Lambda. We are an NVIDIA preferred partner (and keep winning the preferred partner award). I don't know what the allocation numbers are for other companies, but we get a lot.

It's in NVIDIAs best interest to spread the love around and make sure all the GPUs don't go to the hyperscalers.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#20

Post by autoexecbat »

rvba wrote: post #4
freeqaz wrote: post #2

How are these companies even getting these GPUs? I would imagine NVIDIA would give them all to Microsoft and Google if they are in short supply.

Why couldnt NVIDIA auction some to get best price? I mean locking customers long term is probably better, but a certain % of product still vould be sold for a spot price? This made me wonder what is the optimum split on that - obviously depends on your market placement, but isnt nvidia basically a monopoly now?

At some point, nvidia does have to worry about amd getting their act together once they've annoyed all the current customers
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