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Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

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Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#111

Post by Aurornis »

neya wrote: post #108
shubhamjain wrote: post #11

If you think you need to spend $100B, does using a third-party cloud provider still make sense? It doesn’t matter what sweet deal Amazon is pitching—in that scenario, you’d want to own your stack. Especially in a hyper-competitive field like this, where margins are going to matter a lot soon. It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner…

I remember seeing this extremely shocking graph of top AI companies on Facebook on how the money just keeps changing hands between a handful of companies. Almost seemed like a scam.

Money doesn’t just flow around with nothing exchanged. The money is in payment for goods and services.

It’s common even for smaller companies to do mutually beneficial business with each other. It’s actually helpful to do business with people who are also your customers because you have a relationship with them and you also have leverage: They are extra incentivized to treat you well because they don’t want to upset any of the other business you have with them.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#112

Post by amluto »

IMTDb wrote: post #106
shubhamjain wrote: post #11

If you think you need to spend $100B, does using a third-party cloud provider still make sense? It doesn’t matter what sweet deal Amazon is pitching—in that scenario, you’d want to own your stack. Especially in a hyper-competitive field like this, where margins are going to matter a lot soon. It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner…

The problem is that at that scale, the alternative is building your own data centers. You'd probably want at least 2 in the US, 2 in Europe, 2 in Asia, maybe 1 in Africa and 1 in LATAM. So 8-10, and you need at least half of them ready "on time." What does "on time" mean? You'll need to negotiate with local authorities, some friendly, some not. Data centers aren't exactly popular neighbors these days. Then negotiate…

Other than data sovereignty, does the data center location really matter that much? Current inference systems are not exactly low latency.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#114

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

iot_devs wrote: post #7

Someone can explain to me what's the expectations for these AI labs? I mostly see their products as commodity at this point, with strong open source contenders. Eventually it will become hard to justify the premium on these models.

They are a commodity - but also cyber weapons. Warmongering nations are now in an arms race to have the best AI so they can have superior cyber weapons, intelligence capabilities. But they don't want to pick just one lab, they want multiple AI defense contractors to compete over contracts.

As the US sold weapons to many nations in the past, so will China, the US, France, etc sell AI cyber capability to other nations. Likely every modern nation will need some datacenter to host a cluster of the preferred vendor, as nobody's going to trust the US or China with their security.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#117

Post by fred_is_fred »

Tulip Corp has reached a definitive finance agreement with Rhine. Rhine will invest 5 Billion guilders in Tulip Corp, and Tulip Corp will be buying 100 Billion guilders of fertilizer and irrigation water from Rhine. This helps Tulip Corp ensure that it's critical infrastructure needs are met.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#118

Post by Aurornis »

amluto wrote: post #112
IMTDb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that at that scale, the alternative is building your own data centers. You'd probably want at least 2 in the US, 2 in Europe, 2 in Asia, maybe 1 in Africa and 1 in LATAM. So 8-10, and you need at least half of them ready "on time." What does "on time" mean? You'll need to negotiate with local authorities, some friendly, some not. Data centers aren't exactly popular neighbors these days. Then negotiate…

Other than data sovereignty, does the data center location really matter that much? Current inference systems are not exactly low latency.

It’s the power and water needs.

Large data centers consume as much power as a small city. The location decision is about being able to connect to a power grid that is ready to supply that.

Evaporative cooling also needs steady water supply. There are data centers which don’t operate on evaporative cooling but it’s more equipment intensive and expensive.

Latency doesn’t matter. You can get fast enough internet connected to these sites much more easily than finding power.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#119

Post by Aurornis »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #107
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xAI built a datacenter in a few weeks, if I remember correctly.

xAI built the Colossus data center in 122 days (just the physical construction time). Colossus initially had ~200k GPUs. 100B buys you ~1 million high end GPUs running 24/7 for a year at AWS retail prices.

Initial Colossus buildout was 100K GPUs

They also reused an existing building that happened to be in the right place at the right time. The larger data center buildouts would almost always need new, dedicated construction.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#120

Post by zozbot234 »

anonyfox wrote: post #69

Sounds like moneygrab is accelerating before consumer grade local models are getting good enough for local inference in few years. Huge house of cards here. Demand skyrocketing until it’s suddenly dropping entirely with ondevice inference.

The consumer models are quite good already, the main bottleneck on local inference is hardware. But even then you can run tiny models on mostly anything, things only get harder as you try to scale up to more knowledgeable models and a larger context.
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