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I’m semi-convinced that Stadia is just a way to subsidize GPU’s for ML. I’m not sure it’s possible for Stadia to ever turn a profit. But if it can help Google

I’m semi-convinced that Stadia is just a way to subsidize GPU’s for ML. I’m not sure it’s possible for Stadia to ever turn a profit. But if it can help Google pay for tens of thousands of new GPUs every year which burn through ML tasks when not in use? That might be a pretty good deal for Google. Maybe Stadia can break even. Maybe it can turn a tidy profit. I don’t see how that will ever be enough profit for Google to care.

avinium 7y ago
This sounds like it makes sense, but falls apart when you start to scratch the surface. ML practitioners can - by and large - build affordable GPU rigs. That’s why Google is heavily pushing cloud TPUs instead - they significantly outperform GPUs and you can’t buy them (retail or wholesale). You might get some spillover but I can’t see them making an investment as large as Stadia purely to soak up extra ML GPU capacity. If anything, it would be the other way around.