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Opportunity cost is cost. What you could have earned by selling the resources to customers instead of using them yourself is what the resources are worth.
by rty32 2y ago
Opportunity cost is cost. What you could have earned by selling the resources to customers instead of using them yourself is what the resources are worth.
- g15jv2dp 2y agoThis assumes that you can sell 100% of the resources' availability 100% of the time. Whenever you have more capacity that you can sell, there's no opportunity cost in using it yourself.
- michaelt 2y agoA few months back, a lot of the most powerful GPU instances on GCP seemed to be sold out 24/7. I suppose it's possible Google's own infrastructure is partitioned from GCP infrastructure, so they have a bunch of idle GPUs even while their cloud division can sell every H100 and A100 they can get their hands on?
- dmurray 2y agoI'd expect they have both: dedicated machines that they usually use and are sometimes idle, but also the ability to run a job on GCP if it makes sense. (I doubt it's the other way round, that the Deepmind researchers could come in one day and find all their GPUs are being used by some cloud customer).
- myworkinisgood 2y agoAs someone who worked for an compute time provider, I can tell you that the last people who can use the system for free are internal people. Because external people bring in cash revenue while internal people just bring in potential future revenue.
- nkrisc 2y agoNot if you’re only using the resources when they’re available because no customer has paid to use them.
- K0balt 2y agoI think Google produces their own power, so they don’t pay distribution cost which is at least one third of the price of power, even higher for large customers.