181–190 of 985 posts
One thing we saw with the dot-com bust is how certain individuals were able to cash in on the failures, e.g., low cost hardware, domain names, etc. (NB. prices may exceed $2) Perhaps people are already thinking about they can cash in on the floor space and HVAC systems that will be left in the wake of failed "AI" hype
One thing we saw with the dot-com bust is how certain individuals were able to cash in on the failures, e.g., low cost hardware, domain names, etc. (NB. prices may exceed $2) Perhaps people are already thinking about they can cash in on the floor space and HVAC systems that will be left in the wake of failed "AI" hype
I'm looking forward to buying my own slightly used 5 million square ft data centre in Texas for $1
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A typical data centre is $2,500 per year per kW load (including overhead, hvac and so on). If it costs $800,000 to replace the whole rack, then that would pay off in a year if it reduces 320 kW of consumption. Back when we ran servers, we wouldn't assume 100% utilisation but AI workloads do do that; normal server loads would be 10kW per rack and AI is closer to 100. So yeah, it's not hard to imagine power savings of…
Thanks for the numbers! Isn't it more likely that the amount of power/heat generated per rack will stay constant over each upgrade cycle, and the upgrade simply unlocks a higher amount of service revenue per rack?
And they went from zero to multiple GPUs per server. Tho we might hit "the chips can't be bigger and the cooling can't get much better" point there.
The usage would be similar if it was say a rack filled with servers full of bulk storage (hard drives generally keep the power usage similar while growing storage).
But CPU/GPU wise, it's just bigger chips/more chiplets, more power.
I'd imagine any flattening might be purely because "we have DC now, re-building cooling for next gen doesn't make sense so we will just build servers with similar power usage as previously", but given how fast AI pushed the development it might not happen for a while.
One thing we saw with the dot-com bust is how certain individuals were able to cash in on the failures, e.g., low cost hardware, domain names, etc. (NB. prices may exceed $2) Perhaps people are already thinking about they can cash in on the floor space and HVAC systems that will be left in the wake of failed "AI" hype
> Krishna also referenced the depreciation of the AI chips inside data centers as another factor: "You've got to use it all in five years because at that point, you've got to throw it away and refill it," he said This doesn't seem correct to me, or at least is built on several shaky assumptions. One would have to 'refill' your hardware if: - AI accelerator cards all start dying around the 5 year mark, which is possib…
It's just the same dynamic as old servers. They still work fine but power costs make them uneconomical compared to latest tech.
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Same, the bang for buck on a 5yo server is insane. I got an old Dell a year ago (to replace our 15yo one that finally died) and it was $1200 AUD for a maxed out recently-retired server with 72TB of hard drives and something like 292GB of RAM.
Just not too old. Easy to get into "power usage makes it not worth it" for any use case when it runs 24/7
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It's just the same dynamic as old servers. They still work fine but power costs make them uneconomical compared to latest tech.
that was then. now, high-end chips are reaching 4,3,2 nm. power savings aren't that high anymore. what's the power saving going from 4 to 2nm?
The interesting macro view on what's happening is to compare a mature data center operation (specifically a commoditized one) with the utility business. The margins here, and in similar industries with big infra build-out costs (ex: rail) are quite small. Historically the businesses have not done well; I can't really imagine what happens when tech companies who've only ever known huge, juicy margins experience low si…
Worse, is that a lot of these people are acting like Moore's law isn't still in effect. People conflate clock speeds on beefy hardware with moore's law, and act like it's dead, when transistor density rises, and cost per transistor continue to fall at rates similar to what they always have. That means the people racing to build out infrastructure today might just be better off parking that money in a low interest acc…