Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6B valuation

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 60 posts

Re: Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6B valuation

#41

Post by surgical_fire »

almyk wrote: post #36
surgical_fire wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh? Is the average developer paying 200$ a month? I mean, I imagine some top% vibe coding bros paying 200$. I would require some serious evidence that the average developer pays for it. I certainly wouldn't. It's moderately useful, but not 200$/mo useful.

My work pays for the $200 sub for me. At work in a typical 5h slot I tend to use 35~40% of the usage limit, so the $100 sub wouldn’t let me keep my current workflow and AI usage but I am more often than not using 2x the $100 sub. We’ll see if they keep paying for this or not, because we are not yet sure if using AI like this is sustainable and worth the tech debt of moving faster

But that is your employer paying a license (probably in bulk, I have no idea how much B2B sales cost for AI). My employer pays licenses for a lot of things that I probably wouldn't pay personally.

The person I was replying to said the average developer pays 200$. I call bullshit on that one.

Re: Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6B valuation

#42

Post by crimsoneer »

energy123 wrote: post #10

I don't get the economics behind building AI DCs in the UK instead of a middle income country near the equator where there's plentiful solar or fossil fuels. Labor and land is expensive, energy is scarce and expensive, and colocation is not that valuable because latency is dominated by compute instead of transmission. But there must be a good reason I am missing.

It's not actually building many datacenters there right? It's just incorporated there.

Re: Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6B valuation

#43

Post by zozbot234 »

cmiles8 wrote: post #15

This is all starting to smell like financial engineering games. Traditionally nobody in their right mind would give a startup billions to build data centers. For a long list of reasons, that’s kinda nuts. However what it does allow all these companies investing to do is fund significant capital expenditure but hide it on their balance sheet. They all know if they funded capex directly it would create a deprecation st…

Deprecation is the right way to spell it when it comes to GPUs, because the hardware becomes totally obsolete and uncompetitive after only a few years and you have to replace it wholesale. It's a slow-moving trainwreck.

Re: Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6B valuation

#44

Post by DaedalusII »

energy123 wrote: post #10

I don't get the economics behind building AI DCs in the UK instead of a middle income country near the equator where there's plentiful solar or fossil fuels. Labor and land is expensive, energy is scarce and expensive, and colocation is not that valuable because latency is dominated by compute instead of transmission. But there must be a good reason I am missing.

good question, but there is a rational answer. remember if youre going to tie up a few billion in a project you want strong laws around ownership

singapore ran out of land. malaysia ran out of water and electricity

indonesia is unstable politically and just started confiscating foreign owned farms

india is too politically risky. people will just steal your shit

middle east - israel/iran chabad trump war etc. all within ballistic missile range, unstable

africa is africa

latin america no infrastructure (highways, power grid, etc)

labor is other bottleneck. it actually borderline impossible to bring in skilled engineers and technical specialist to remote energy rich areas

Re: Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6B valuation

#45

Post by DaedalusII »

dijit wrote: post #29
energy123 wrote: post #10

I don't get the economics behind building AI DCs in the UK instead of a middle income country near the equator where there's plentiful solar or fossil fuels. Labor and land is expensive, energy is scarce and expensive, and colocation is not that valuable because latency is dominated by compute instead of transmission. But there must be a good reason I am missing.

Huh, you think the equator is better for datacenters? I've never heard that. I mean, there's a reason Luleå is a popular datacenter spot: access to hydro & wind- but also "free cooling"; datacenters create a lot of heat and having a cold environment makes it easier to maintain ambient temperatures that are sustainable with lower energy consumption. Additionally, people tend to prefer their servers are in geopolitical…

singapore/malaysia/indonesia one of the best places in the world for datacentres. just have to build absurd cooling systems and use coal power plants

the bottleneck is they keep running out of water for cooling

Re: Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6B valuation

#46

Post by zozbot234 »

DaedalusII wrote: post #44
energy123 wrote: post #10

I don't get the economics behind building AI DCs in the UK instead of a middle income country near the equator where there's plentiful solar or fossil fuels. Labor and land is expensive, energy is scarce and expensive, and colocation is not that valuable because latency is dominated by compute instead of transmission. But there must be a good reason I am missing.

good question, but there is a rational answer. remember if youre going to tie up a few billion in a project you want strong laws around ownership singapore ran out of land. malaysia ran out of water and electricity indonesia is unstable politically and just started confiscating foreign owned farms india is too politically risky. people will just steal your shit middle east - israel/iran chabad trump war etc. all with…

> india is too politically risky. people will just steal your shit

India is a huge place and some parts of it are vastly better managed than others.

> latin america no infrastructure (highways, power grid, etc)

The governance problem is quite real in Latin America actually, but I think it may have potential. If some infrastructure gets funded in the process it would have beneficial side effects all around.

Re: Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6B valuation

#47

Post by khy34 »

empath75 wrote: post #37
khy34 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question should really be what is the reservation price of existing buyers. At some point the price will rise. But the value has to have risen for existing buyers to be ok with that - but can they perceive the value? Hmmm difficult to tell. Benchmarks are not an objective way to measure that. In the long run google is most likely to acquire a serious cost advantage given their level of vertical integration.

We've been experimenting with claude code handling jira tickets and opening PR -- we're starting with Opus. It costs about $1 per PR that gets merged-- how much does it cost to have a software engineer do that PR? That's your price sensitivity. It will only get cheaper as models get more efficient and people get better at using them, though.

You’re operating in a micro perspective.

Managers of firms care about impact of financials. They don’t care about the metrics you are measuring / gaming. Ultimately all ‘progress’ has to show in the cash flows.

Are you taking more cost reduction projects and more revenue-generating projects? Are you actually delivering? Are customers perceiving you to be as trusted as before? Etc. are the only things that matter. ‘Show me the money’.

To me this is akin to the discussion re. Scrum, agile etc. Who cares? Show me the money.

Re: Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6B valuation

#48

Post by figmert »

DaedalusII wrote: post #44
energy123 wrote: post #10

I don't get the economics behind building AI DCs in the UK instead of a middle income country near the equator where there's plentiful solar or fossil fuels. Labor and land is expensive, energy is scarce and expensive, and colocation is not that valuable because latency is dominated by compute instead of transmission. But there must be a good reason I am missing.

good question, but there is a rational answer. remember if youre going to tie up a few billion in a project you want strong laws around ownership singapore ran out of land. malaysia ran out of water and electricity indonesia is unstable politically and just started confiscating foreign owned farms india is too politically risky. people will just steal your shit middle east - israel/iran chabad trump war etc. all with…

> africa is africa

Jeez what a way to dismiss the second largest continent and the second most populous landmass in the world.

I'd argue Africa is the best place to start such a thing. Cheap labour, plenty of renewable energy. The biggest issue it probably has is how little bandwidth it has, and might require additional sea cables.

But "africa is africa" is not a way reason to dismiss the continent.

Re: Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6B valuation

#49

Post by zozbot234 »

vel0city wrote: post #40
mghackerlady wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know nothing about the inner workings of a large scale AI datacenter but I'd imagine the power and cooling requirements are more specialised than your average datacenter that mostly has to handle transmitting large amounts of data over the internet (not that that isn't computationally expensive, I just imagine LLMs (especially at the current scale of their deployment) are much more demanding)

> I'd imagine the power and cooling requirements are more specialised than your average datacenter But are they actually doing things differently than the high compute parts of the hyperscaled datacenters? Are there radical new ways of distributing heat in the datacenter that only makes sense at that level of energy usage per square foot? Is AI energy use that much higher per square foot of other high-compute parts o…

There's "high compute", and then there's proper HPC. AI these days is way more on the HPC end of the scale. The GPUs are doing computations using 2-bit and 4-bit numbers and not 64-bit, but everything else is going to be comparable.
Post reply on HN