The infrastructure and energy required to power these systems at scale are critical. I hope we carefully consider the environmental impact of building and operating data centers. I’m optimistic that we will develop efficient and sustainable solutions to power the data centers of today and the future
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
#542Life was so much cheaper in the '80, when you could travel in time with just 1.21GW.
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#543there's a worrying lack of structural integrity building up in this hype bubble and this adds more fuel to the fire.
You essentially have Nvidia propping up its own valuation here by being its own customer. If they sold a bunch of H100's to themselves and then put it as revenue on their books they'd be accused of fraud. Doing it this way is only slightly better.
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#544I feel like data center deployments is the new metric that companies choose to show growth vs the old headcount growth.
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#545In accounting terms, this is a shady business practice known as "round tripping" where you invest in a company for the sole purpose of them buying your product. It allows you to count your revenue multiple times.
I don't really understand how it is round tripping. In the end, Nvidia will have OpenAI shares, which are valuable, and OpenAI will have GPUs, which are also valuable. It is not fake revenue, the GPUs will be made, sold at market price, and used, they are not intended to be bought back and sold to another customer. And hopefully, these GPUs will be put to good use by OpenAI so that they can make a profit, which will…
A dollar is always a dollar, so it's hard to claim that $1 million in revenue is actually worth $10 million. OpenAI shares, on the other hand, aren't publicly traded, so it's much easier to claim they're worth $10 million when noone would actually be willing to buy for more than $1 million.
It's not necessarily manipulative but it's also not exactly an arms-length purchase of GPUs on the open market.
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#546Water is a critical resource in dwindling supplies in many water-stressed regions. These data centers have been known to suck up water supplies during active droughts. Is there anyone left at the EPA that gets a say in how we manage water for projects like this?
Water pollution bigger danger than water usage. Look up videos of people whose water changes color after a data center was built nearby.
They cause all kinds of problems. We could even include all of the new methane power plants that will likely need to be built.
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a ridiculous amount claimed for sure. If its 2 kW per it's around 5 million, and 1 to 2 kW is definitely the right ballpark at a system level. The NVL72 is 72 chips is 120 kW total for the rack. If you throw in ~25 kW for cooling its pretty much exactly 2 kW each.
So each 2KW component is like a top-shelf space heater which the smart money never did want to run unless it was quite cold outside.
It will be the world's most advanced resistor.
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#548Framing 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…
To me, the question is less about “how do we make more energy” and more about “how do we make LLMs 100x more energy efficient.” Not saying this is an easy problem to solve, but it all seems like a stinky code smell.
I'm pretty confident that if LLMs were made 100x more energy efficient, we would just build bigger LLMs or run more parallel inference. OpenAI's GPT-5 Pro could become the baseline, and their crazy expensive IMO model could become the Pro offering. Especially if that energy efficiency came with speedups as well (I would be surprised if it didn't). The demand for smarter models seems very strong.
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I love that term "refining energy". We need to plan for massive growth in electricity production to have the supply to refine.
Sounds smart but it’s abusing the semantics of “refine” and is therefore ultimately vacuous.
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#550Framing 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…
An 8% increase y/o/y is quite substantial, however keep in mind globally we experienced the 2022 fuel shock. In Australia for example we saw energy prices double that year. Although wholesale electricity prices show double-digit average year-on-year swings, their true long-run growth is closer to ~6% per year, slightly above wages at ~4% during the same period. So power has become somewhat less affordable, but still…
6% YoY is much higher than the 2-3% inflation target