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IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

businessinsider.com

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Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#401

Post by [deleted] »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #357
Esras wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the sentiment is usually paired with discussion about those products as long-lasting, revenue-generating things. Many of those ended up feeding back into Search and Ads. As an exercise, out of the list you described, how many of those are meaningfully-revenue-generating, without ads? A phrasing I've heard is "Google regularly kills billion-dollar businesses because that doesn't move the needle compared to an…

They bought YouTube but you have to give Google a hell of a lot of credit for turning it into what it is today. Taking ownership of YouTube at the time was seen by many as taking ownership of an endless string of copyright lawsuits, suing them into oblivion.

[deleted]

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#402

Post by duped »

darth_avocado wrote: post #295
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #18

> 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…

Isn’t that what Michael Burry is complaining about? That five years is actually too generous when it comes to depreciation of these assets and that companies are being too relaxed with that estimate. The real depreciation is more like 2-3 years for these GPUs that cost tens of thousands of dollars a piece. https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/1987918650104283372

How different is this from rental car companies changing over their fleets? I don't know, this is a genuine question. The cars cost 3-4x as much and last about 2x as far as I know, and the secondary market is still alive.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#403

Post by oblio »

matt-p wrote: post #241
acdha wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s far more extreme: old servers are still okay on I/O, and memory latency, etc. won’t change that dramatically so you can still find productive uses for them. AI workloads are hyper-focused on a single type of work and, unlike most regular servers, a limiting factor in direct competition with other companies.

I mean you could use training GPUs for inference right? That would be use case number 1 for a 8 * a100 box in a couple of years. It can also be used for non IO limited things like folding proteins or other 'scientific' use cases. Push comes to shove im sure an old A100 will run crysis.

All those use cases would probably use up 1% of the current AI infrastructure, let alone ahat they're planning to build.

Yeah, just like gas, possible uses will expand if AI crashes out, but:

* will these uses cover, say, 60% of all this infra?

* will these uses scale up to use that 60% within the next 5-7 years, while that hardware is still relevant and fully functional?

Also, we still have railroad tracks from the 1800s rail mania that were never truly used to capacity and dot com boom dark fiber that's also never been used fully, even with the internet growing 100x since. And tracks and fiber don't degrade as quickly as server hardware and especially GPUs.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#404

Post by viccis »

jsheard wrote: post #215
blibble wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm looking forward to buying my own slightly used 5 million square ft data centre in Texas for $1

Tired: homelabbers bringing decommissioned datacenter gear home. Wired: homelabbers moving into decommissioned datacenters.

I miss First Saturday in Dallas where we honest to god did buy decommissioned datacenter gear out of the back of a van.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#406

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

ekropotin wrote: post #392
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy cow. I have 96GB of DDR5 I bought at start of year for a machine which never materialized. Might have to flip it.

Never in my dreams I could imagine PC parts could be an investment. Someone should start ETF tracking the prices.

For a while with bitcoin, it seemed GPU investing was almost a thing.

I just checked, the kit I bought in February was $270, today it is showing up for $1070. Woof. Now I have to decide if I should keep it on the off chance I do get around to that machine or dump it while the getting is good. Then again, who wants to buy RAM of unknown provenance unless they themselves are looking to scam the seller.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#407

Post by oblio »

q3k wrote: post #173
zppln wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little bit curious about this. Where do all the hardware from the big tech giants usually go once they've upgraded?

In-house hyperscaler stuff gets shredded, after every single piece of flash storage gets first drilled through and every hard drive gets bent by a hydraulic press. Then it goes into the usual e-waste recycling stream (ie. gets sent to poor countries where precious metals get extracted by people with a halved life expectancy). Off-the-shelf enterprise gear has a chance to get a second life through remarketing channels…

Similar to corporate laptops where due to stupid policies, for most BigCos you can't really buy or otherwise get a used laptop, even as the former corporate used of said laptop.

Super environmentally friendly.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#408

Post by raincole »

ic_fly2 wrote: post #25

IBM might not have a data strategy or AI plan but he isn’t wrong on the inability to generate a profit. A bit of napkin math: NVIDIA claims 0.4J per token for their latest generation 1GW plant with 80% utilisation can therefore produce 6.29 10^16 tokens a year. There are ~10^14 tokens on the internet. ~10^19 tokens have been spoken by humans… so far.

> There are ~10^14 tokens on the internet.

Don't know what the source is, but it feels missing a few orders of magnitude. Surely it only counts text? I can't imagine there are only so few data on the internet if you count images and videos.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#409

Post by kccqzy »

mbreese wrote: post #62

I would add an addendum to this -- there is no way the announced spending on AI data centers will all come to fruition. I have no doubt that there will be a massive build-out of infrastructure, but it can't reach the levels that have been announced. The power requirements alone will stop that from happening.

The power requirement is only an issue in western countries, where utilities build at most a double digit buffer, and are used to overall energy use leveling due to efficiency improvements. Now look at China where they routinely maintain a 100% buffer. Demand can double and they can supply that without new generation capacity.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#410

Post by oidar »

cma wrote: post #400
smoe wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Google is bad at building products. They definitely are excellent at scaling products. But I reckon part of the sentiment stems from many of the more famous Google products being acquisitions orignally (Android, YouTube, Maps, Docs, Sheets, DeepMind) or originally built by individual contributors internally (Gmail). Then here were also several times where Google came out with multiple different products…

Why wouldn't you count things initially made by individual contributors at Google?

Because those were "free time" projects. It wasn't directed to do by the company, somebody at the company with their flex time - just thought it was a good idea and did it. Googlers don't get this benefit any more for some reason.
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