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- Meta is paying for these GPUs over multiple years, not a single year. Meta capex is only $30B a year, not all of that went to GPUs. - There's no way Meta is
by 7e 2y ago
- Meta is paying for these GPUs over multiple years, not a single year. Meta capex is only $30B a year, not all of that went to GPUs.
- There's no way Meta is paying retail.
- ncallaway 2y agoI don’t think the Manhattan Project was a single year either?
- oskarkk 2y agoIt wasn't, but we're comparing to the yearly budget of Manhattan/Apollo (as a fraction of GDP). NASA budget was between 0.3-0.9% of GDP in 1963-1970[0], that was per year. In 1965 GDP was $743B (nominal), so 0.5% of that is ~4B, and the (nominal) cost of Apollo (which wasn't the whole NASA budget) was 25B. As aa part of GDP from 1970 (1.073T) the total cost of Apollo would be like 4% of that single year's GDP. Not a good comparison because when Apollo started GDP was 563B and was 1.3T when it ended. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-NASA-Appropriations-and-as-a-Ratio-to-GDP-Per-Capita-1958-2005-Constant-2007_fig4_323116968 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-NASA-Appropriation...
- brandall10 2y agoFrom the linked tweet: "Yann LeCun confirms that Meta spent $30 billion on a million NVIDIA GPUs"
- qeternity 2y agoYann is not a CFO. If I buy a house tomorrow, I don't just consider it a massive one-day expense. They will amortize the cost over the useful life of the hardware.
- brandall10 2y agoThis was addressing the second point which is relevant to the headline: "There's no way Meta is paying retail."
- 7e 2y agoMeta doesn't have the electrical capacity to online a million 700W GPUs in 12 months. And they don't pay until they're delivered.
- loeg 2y agoAdding 700MW in GPUs in 12 months is within Meta's capabilities.
- 7e 2y agoMeta's 2023 electricity usage was 11.5 terawatt-hours [1]. They've historically added about two terawatt-hours per year. That's only 228 MW of additional capacity per year. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/580087/energy-use-of-facebook-meta/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/580087/energy-use-of-fac...
- loeg 2y agoSure, but in every historical year they are also trying not to increase energy use, for cost reasons -- they have not been build-out limited. I don't think adding an additional 150% of historical average is especially challenging (beyond the huge OpEx expenditure, which isn't a problem for Meta).