This is written by a financial company that is pouring billions into data centres.
https://www.apollo.com/insights-news/pressreleases/2026/01/a...
https://www.apollo.com/insights-news/pressreleases/2025/11/a...
etc
The Growing Compute Shortage
31–40 of 99 posts
Re: The Growing Compute Shortage
#32GPUs aren’t scarce. There is just a lot of demand, so prices have gone up. Anyone can get GPUs right now and build out what they need; it’s just a matter of paying more for them than the next company. I’ve been looking at building a multi-TB HBM system lately and they’re readily available - they just cost $400k.
> GPUs aren’t scarce. There is just a lot of demand, so prices have gone up. What does "scarce" mean to you? I'd wager that to most reasonable people it means "available in a supply that, measured against demand, is low". Market forces typically react to such a state by pushing prices up. Saying "they're not scarce, they're just expensive" is just silly. The exception to this would be during e.g. supply chain hiccups…
There is the type of scarce when you can't get something for love or money. Look at the gasoline lines in Russia. Those people sit in lines miles long for gas stations that aren't even open. No matter how much money they are willing to spend, they still can't get the gas.
I'm just grateful that I don't need to upgrade my computer for a while, and cross my fingers that I don't have a hardware failure in the next couple of years. I had an unpleasant laptop failure in 2021 that I don't wish to repeat.
Re: The Growing Compute Shortage
#33GPUs aren’t scarce. There is just a lot of demand, so prices have gone up. Anyone can get GPUs right now and build out what they need; it’s just a matter of paying more for them than the next company. I’ve been looking at building a multi-TB HBM system lately and they’re readily available - they just cost $400k.
> GPUs aren’t scarce. There is just a lot of demand, so prices have gone up. What does "scarce" mean to you? I'd wager that to most reasonable people it means "available in a supply that, measured against demand, is low". Market forces typically react to such a state by pushing prices up. Saying "they're not scarce, they're just expensive" is just silly. The exception to this would be during e.g. supply chain hiccups…
The definition of scarce is rare, or insufficient to meet demand. Not just that supply is low in relation to demand, it means that you physically have trouble getting something.
Re: The Growing Compute Shortage
#34When gas prices went up in the 70s because of fuel shortage, smaller (more fuel efficient) cars became more popular to use less fuel to do the same thing. I wonder if the same will happen with compute, by making software more efficient, and do the same thing with less compute.
Re: The Growing Compute Shortage
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
"subsidizing" aka making 30% gross margin instead of 90%.
Do they actually have net positive income (excluding research, I guess)? I assumed no but I’ve never seen number one way or another.
Anthropic is currently profitable, generating around $1B/quarter and ~$50B in ARR. About 75% to 85% of Anthropic's revenue comes from its usage-based API business, which has a gross margin that exceeds 80%. https://www.tradingkey.com/analysis/stocks/us-stocks/2620181...
Meanwhile, OpenAI is at ~$25B ARR, but is likely not yet profitable.
Re: The Growing Compute Shortage
#36At least one graph showing global total datacenter compute over time and projected to come online would have been helpful.
https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-chip-production from the beginning of 2026 claimed global AI compute capacity was doubling every 7 months.
Not what it says.
> We fit a trend to the quarterly quantities of AI compute sold, as measured in H100-equivalents. We find that computing capacity has been growing by 3.3x per year, equivalent to a doubling time of 7 months.
This is just a graph of cash changing hands. I transferred a loonie from one hand to the other one trillion times this morning and have the largest data centre in the world.
Re: The Growing Compute Shortage
#37I feel this post is blind to many of the secondary side effects of this "shortage". The rapid increase in prices and delivery times is having deleterious effects on all things tech - everything from phones to smart appliances and all sorts of gadgets has moved into unreachable price levels.
Just imagine, if the rumours are true and Apple's 'foldable' phone costs 2500€ or more - who is going to buys this? So much of Apple's ecosystem depends on enough users consuming services, buying apps and using their phones to facilitate digital interactions. I've been waiting for 2 months to get a new mac mini for our office lab, and the Studios have moved into "we can't really justify this expense" price range.
So the framing that AI is inevitable or projections that put the world into a year or more of this "scarcity", where people can no longer afford non-entry level gadgets, are just naive IMO.
Re: The Growing Compute Shortage
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
"subsidizing" aka making 30% gross margin instead of 90%.
no, even if we assume their margins are 90% (they are not) they are still losing money because the $200 plans allow for tens of thousands of dollars worth of inference and a huge number of users are milking every cent across multiple accounts. Every “reset” OpenAI and Anthropic do is setting money on fire. If it were true that they’re making money hand over fist they wouldn’t need to raise tens of billions of dollars…
> even if we assume their margins are 90% (they are not)
How do you know they are not?
It will be curious to see the cost of inference for these newly released open weight models and will help give an idea of the actual cost of inference. But for now, I think saying the $200 plans allows for "tens of thousands of dollars worth of inference" provides very little insight when you are measuring the inference cost in API pricing with an unknown margin.
Re: The Growing Compute Shortage
#39GPUs aren’t scarce. There is just a lot of demand, so prices have gone up. Anyone can get GPUs right now and build out what they need; it’s just a matter of paying more for them than the next company. I’ve been looking at building a multi-TB HBM system lately and they’re readily available - they just cost $400k.
Without realizing it, you are coming close to the economics definition of relative scarcity. If we went by uour definition, basically nothing is scarce, ever, because it's possible to provide it, but the prices are set in a way that is completely unrelated to the cost of production + risk related margin. Instead prices resemble what would be an auction. And it all only works out because demand is elastic, so there are prices that people refuse to pay, because for their use case, they'd lose money.
Housing, collectors items, access to the time of a top of the line doctor... all relatively scarce. And You'd be laughed out pf most rooms if you claimed those things aren't scarce.
Re: The Growing Compute Shortage
#40It will be fascinating to watch this play out. Particularly if AI-compute satellite constellations become a reality - We're trending towards a matrioshka brain and I'll be happy if I live to see the beginnings of that future
They'll become a reality on the same day as solar roadways.