> You can't really know until you have access to such a vast amount of horsepower, and can apply it to whatever you want. Something I've often wondered, and th

> You can't really know until you have access to such a vast amount of horsepower, and can apply it to whatever you want. Something I've often wondered, and there are probably good reasons why, is that billionaire tech moguls - even the ones who are outwardly technical (or were in the past - people like Bill Gates, who we know had technical chops in the past) - that none of them (that I'm aware of) haven't ever tried to build "their ultimate computer". For instance, if I had their kind of money, I've often thought that I would construct a datacenter (or maybe multiple datacenters, networked together) filled with NVidia GPU/TPU/whatever hardware (the best of the best they could sell me) - purely for use as my "personal computer". Completely non-public, non-commercial - just a datacenter I would own with racks filled to the brim with the best computing tech I could stuff into them (on a side note, I've also pondered the idea of such a personal datacenter, but filled with D-Wave quantum computing machines or the like). What could you do with such a system? Obviously anything massive parallelism could be useful for - the usual simulation, machine learning, etc; but could you make any breakthroughs with it - assuming you had the knowledge to do such work? Which is probably why none have done it - at least as a personal thing. I mean, sure, I would bet that people who own large swathes of machines in a datacenter, or those who outright own datacenter (like Google or Amazon) - their founders and likely internal people do run massively parallel experiments or whatnot on a regular basis, ad-hoc, and "free" - but it's a commercial thing, and other stuff is also running on those machines... But a single person is probably unlikely to have or think of problems that would require such a grand scale before they would just "start a company to do it" or something similar; because in the end, just to maintain and administer everything in such a datacenter, if one were built, would require (I would think) the resources of a large company. Of course, then I wonder if such companies - especially ones like Google and Amazon, which own and run many datacenters around the world, and also sell the resources of them for compute purposes - weren't started in some fashion (even if only in the back of their heads) by their founders with that idea or goal in mind (that is, to be able to own and use on their whim "the world's largest amount of computing power"...?