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OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems

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Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems

#441

Post by paxys »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #371

Framing it in gigawatts is very interesting given the controversy about skyrocketing electric prices for residential and small business users as a result of datacenters over the past three years, primarily driven by AI growth. If, as another commenter notes, this 10GW is how much Chicago and NYC use combined , then we need to have a serious discussion about where this power is going to come from given the dismal stat…

Watt is the hottest new currency in big tech. Want to launch something big? You don't have to ask for dollars or headcount or servers or whatever else used to be the bottleneck in the past. There's plenty of all this to go around (and if not it can be easily bought). Success or failure now depends on whether you can beg and plead your way to getting a large enough kilowatt/megawatt allocation over every other team that's fighting for it. Everything is measured this way.

Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems

#442

Post by onesociety2022 »

gehsty wrote: post #158
labrador wrote: post #131

For scale: The 1960's era US Navy submarine I served on had a 78MW reactor, so 10GW is 128 nuclear submarines

Some more context, Nuclear power stations can be up to 2GW, offshore windfarms are seemingly hitting a plateau at ~1.5GW, individual turbines in operations now are 15MW. Grids are already strained, 525kV DC systems can transmit ~2GW of power per cable bundle… Adding 10GW of offtake to any grid is going to cause significant problems and likely require CAPEX intensive upgrades (try buy 525kV dc cable from an establishe…

But that's assuming they actually have to transport power over long distances right? If they colocate these massive AI datacenters right next to the power generation plants, it should be cheap to transport the power. You don't need to upgrade massive sections of the grid and build long-distance power lines.

The xAI Colossus 2 1GW data centers seem to be located about ~20 miles from the power generation utility (https://semianalysis.com/2025/09/16/xais-colossus-2-first-gi...)

Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems

#443

Post by kimixa »

radu_floricica wrote: post #263
JCM9 wrote: post #108

This is throwing more cards on the house of cards. Nvidia is “investing” in OpenAI so OpenAI can buy GPUs from NVidia. Textbook “round tripping.” I generally like what’s been happening with AI but man this is gonna crash hard when reality sets in. We’re reaching the scary stage of a bubble where folks are forced to throw more and more cash on the fire to keep it going with no clear path to ever get that cash back. If…

But real GPUs are being built, installed and used. It's not paper money, it's just buying goods and services partly with stock. Which is a very solid and time honored tradition which happens to align incentives very well.

But GPUs are a depreciating asset - if there's a bubble burst and your 5 million GPUs are idle for the next few years before demand picks up again, they'll be pretty outdated and of limited use.

Infrastructure tends to have much longer lifetimes. A lot of the telco infrastructure "overbuilt" during that boom is still used today - you can always blow new fibre, replace endpoints and all that without digging everything up again, which was the largest cost in the first place. Sure, in the above example you'll still the datacentre itself (and things like electricity connections and cooling) that can be reused, but that's a relatively small fraction of the total cost comparitively.

Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems

#444

Post by mensetmanusman »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #371

Framing it in gigawatts is very interesting given the controversy about skyrocketing electric prices for residential and small business users as a result of datacenters over the past three years, primarily driven by AI growth. If, as another commenter notes, this 10GW is how much Chicago and NYC use combined , then we need to have a serious discussion about where this power is going to come from given the dismal stat…

“ skyrocketing electric prices for residential and small business users as a result of datacenters over the past three years”

This is probably naïve. Prices skyrocketed in Germany for similar reasons before AI data centers were a thing.

Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems

#445

Post by mensetmanusman »

stogot wrote: post #389
ComputerGuru wrote: post #371

Framing it in gigawatts is very interesting given the controversy about skyrocketing electric prices for residential and small business users as a result of datacenters over the past three years, primarily driven by AI growth. If, as another commenter notes, this 10GW is how much Chicago and NYC use combined , then we need to have a serious discussion about where this power is going to come from given the dismal stat…

I actually don’t like this measurement, as it’s vague and dilutes the announcement. Each product has a different efficiency of watts. Imagine Ford announced “a strategic partnership with FedEx to deploy 10 giga-gallons of ICE vehicles”

It’s a sticky metric though because Moores law per power consumption died years ago.

Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems

#446

Post by mikhmha »

cubefox wrote: post #334

To the people who are calling this evidence of a bubble: There is no credible indication that AI in general is a bubble, even if not all investments will make sense in retrospect. Quite the opposite, the progress in the field over the last few years is staggering. AI systems are becoming superhuman at more and more tasks. It's only a question of time till AI will outperform us at everything.

There is no indication of being in a bubble when you're actually in one. Its only after the bubble pops do people recognize it in hindsight. Otherwise there would be no bubbles and we wouldn't see large institutions fall for this crap.

What is a credible indication? Who is credible? Its all subjective. Its possible to fool yourself endlessly when financial incentives are involved. The banks did it with mortgages.

Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems

#448

Post by aurareturn »

elbasti wrote: post #403
ComputerGuru wrote: post #371

Framing it in gigawatts is very interesting given the controversy about skyrocketing electric prices for residential and small business users as a result of datacenters over the past three years, primarily driven by AI growth. If, as another commenter notes, this 10GW is how much Chicago and NYC use combined , then we need to have a serious discussion about where this power is going to come from given the dismal stat…

I work in the datacenter space. The power consumption of a data center is the "canonical" way to describe their size. Almost every component in a datacenter is upgradeable—in fact, the compute itself only has a lifespan of ~5 years—but the power requirements are basically locked-in. A 200MW data center will always be a 200MW data center, even though the flops it computes will increase. The fact that we use this unit…

  A 200MW data center will always be a 200MW data center, even though the flops it computes will increase.
This here underscores how important TSMC's upcoming N2 node is. It only increases chip density by ~1.15x (very small relative to previous nodes advancements) but it uses 36% less energy at the same speed as N3 or 18% faster than N3 at the same energy. It's coming at the right time for AI chips used by consumers and energy starved data centers.

N2 is shaping up to be TSMC's most important node since N7.

Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems

#450

Post by aurareturn »

huijzer wrote: post #433
nilkn wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 100% plausible and believable that there's going to be a spectacular bubble popping, but saying we are way past peak LLM would be like saying we were way past peak internet in 1999-2001 -- in reality, we weren't even remotely close to peak internet (and possibly still aren't). In fact, we were so far from the peak in 2001 that entire technological revolutions occurred many years later (e.g., smartphones) that ju…

[flagged]

  “You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future,” he told the room, according to a Verge reporter.

  “We have better models, and we just can’t offer them, because we don’t have the capacity,” he said. GPUs remain in short supply, limiting the company’s ability to scale.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-altman-admits-openai-tota...

So why would Altman say AI is in a bubble but OpenAI wants to invest trillions? Here's my speculation:

1. OpenAI is a private company. They don't care about their own stock price.

2. OpenAI just raised $8.3b 3 weeks ago on $300b valuation ($500b valuation today). He doesn't care if the market drops until he needs to raise again.

3. OpenAI wants to buy some AI companies but they're too expensive so he's incentivized to knock the price of those companies down. For example, OpenAI's $3b deal for Windsurf fell apart when Google stepped in and hired away the co-founder.

4. He wants to retain OpenAI's talent because Meta is spending billions hiring away the top AI talent, including talent from OpenAI. By saying it's in a bubble and dropping public sentiment, the war for AI talent could cool down.

5. He wants other companies to get scared and not invest as much while OpenAI continues to invest a lot so it can stay ahead. For example, maybe investors looking to invest in Anthropic, xAI, and other private companies are more shaky after his comments and invest less. This benefits OpenAI since they just raised.

6. You should all know that Sam Altman is manipulative. This is how he operates. Just google "Sam Altman manipulative" and you'll see plenty of examples where former employees said he lies and manipulates.

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