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Google Cloud now has a dedicated cluster of Nvidia GPUs for YC startups
- outside1234 2y agoSo Google can't sell the GPUs to actually paying customers is what this tells me. In contrast with Microsoft where they are GPU limited (don't have enough to sell).
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- adin8mon 2y ago[flagged]
- ruined 2y agocloud-to-butt extension really spices up this concept
- scarface_74 2y agoYes because out of all the things that a startup should be worried about, thinking that one day they might want to host their own cluster of GPUs should be top of mind…
- kyrra 2y agoGoogler, opinions are my own. I don't work on cloud. While AWS is more popular and has more public documentation and blogs, One thing I've heard about gcp that people seem to love a More consistent UI and CLI. Features also tend to interop better. But when you have those is some of your driving goals, it can slow down the rollout of new features. It's also very possible to use gcp without doing lock-in, if you stay away from specialized services like spanner.
- influx 2y agoA Googler who benefits from GOOG RSU going brrr says Google is better than a competitor. OK? Are you authorized to speak on Google's behalf publicly?
- kyrra 2y agoOur market share in cloud speaks volumes. We had a huge start with AppEngine. But for some reason we failed to launch. I'd guess it was a lack of support and enterprise hand holding. the cloud team hasbeen trying to play catch-up there, and it's just taking a lot of work.
- kyruzic 2y agoHe even started his comment like it had been approved by lawyer first lol
- kyrra 2y agoHa. Nope. I post a bunch of nonsense on the Internet, but if I'm writing about anything Google, I will always start with that message. I am definitely skewed by being paid to work there. Also, I've never ran anything I've written about Google online by anyone internally.
- yas_hmaheshwari 2y ago> More consistent UI and CLI. Features also tend to interop better I agree with this part of the statement. Having used both AWS and GCP, GCP seems a bit easier to navigate > if you stay away from specialized services like spanner Don't agree with this one. Once you are in one cloud, you are locked-in. Using services like BigQuery, Google pub-sub would eventually lock you in
- scarface_74 2y agoFormer AWS ProServe employee - I did work in cloud and had some part in quite a few migrations. I did my bid at BigTech and I have no love loss for Amazon. You can not use any service at scale and avoid “lock in”. “Infrastructure has weight”. I’ve seen it take over a year to migrate an organizations VMWare hosted VMs to AWS. No “just use Kubernetes” is not the answer. Every hosted Kubernetes provider has some type of custom metadata you need to add to your configuration. It can be leaky. No “just use Terraform” is not the answer. Providers are unique for each cloud platform and you still have to rewrite everything. Not to mention at scale, you have to deal with the PMO, compliance, training, if you are large enough you might have a physical connection from your Colo to the provider etc..
- p1esk 2y agoInteresting, I’d expect Google to offer TPUs, not GPUs.
- ipsum2 2y ago> Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups access to a dedicated, subsidized cluster of Nvidia graphics processing units and Google tensor processing units to build AI models. It's both.
- moneywoes 2y agowhat’s the difference in practice
- michaelt 2y agoAt cloud prices, TPUs are cheaper per FLOP but have much worse library support, leading to much higher upfront engineering costs - and you're locked into Google's cloud. On the other hand, essentially every ML project works out-the-box with nvidia GPUs. There's still vendor lock-in to nvidia, but it's more palatable. If you spend $100k of an ML engineer's time to get FooNet to work on TPU, then the cutting edge advances or you pivot and instead you need BarNet support - you might wish you'd spent that $100k just buying a stack of nvidia GPUs.
- martinald 2y agoBut also the cost per FLOP will/has/should come down aggressively over time for nvidia, whereas I doubt Google will do the same for TPUs (as they have lock in). Also the hyperscalers as per usual are far more expensive than others - this is an incomplete list https://getdeploying.com/reference/cloud-gpu/nvidia-h100 https://getdeploying.com/reference/cloud-gpu/nvidia-h100 - GCP seems to be around the $100/hour for the 8xH100 config (similar to AWS).
- robertlagrant 2y ago> whereas I doubt Google will do the same for TPUs (as they have lock in) They aren't the incumbent; this would be an incredibly short-term strategy, wouldn't it?
- aussieguy1234 2y agohow common is it for venture funds to buy bulk cloud services for use in startups they own/invest in?
- foolfoolz 2y agovery common. we had many thousands of dollars in cloud provider credits through our investors
- Narkov 2y agoNot sure many VC's are actually spending money to get those credits versus being given them for free as a promotional tool.
- Astroboy007 2y agoi think A16z has a similar model but I believe they own the servers themselves
- alephnerd 2y agoVery common. All the major CSPs have dedicated Startup and VC GTM teams for this reason. For example, Thoma Bravo's VC fund would give a 10-20% discount on a certain major CSP's compute because of the parent fund's significant stake in that company.
- stingraycharles 2y agoExtremely common, to the point that all major cloud vendors have special VC programs.
- Eridrus 2y agoI have no idea why people are saying this is common. There are plenty of cloud credits programs for startups from GCP, etc, but they are not funded by VCs, they are sales & marketing programs funded by the cloud vendors. A small minority of VCs (AI Grant, a16z, and now YC) have been using their funds to help startups get access to GPUs specifically for the last year and a bit, but there's no need to do a similar thing for general cloud services where there is no shortage.
- bushbaba 2y agoDoes this mean google doesn't have enough external customer demand to fill the needs of it's GPU and TPU resources?
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- mirashii 2y agoOn the contrary, it’s very difficult to get GPUs in GCP and has been for a while.
- outside1234 2y agoThere is no way Google would do this if that was the case. This is a classic cloud vendor move to get someone, anyone, using the fixed asset.
- mirashii 2y ago> Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups access to a dedicated, subsidized cluster of Nvidia graphics They're being paid, so of course they would do it. It's not much different than the reservations that GCP allows you to purchase today.
- holoduke 2y agoReally? Any source on this? I just started one. Yes i know just one.
- mirashii 2y agoA quick search on Google, or r/googlecloud, or one of any number of communities will give some sense. Alternatively, from the article: > For early-stage AI startups, Hu says one of the most common issues she hears is that startups are compute-restrained. Large enterprises are able to strike multi-year, massive deals with cloud providers for GPU access, but small startups are often left out to dry.
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- snihalani 2y agoprivate equity + public equity = unicorns. Thanks openai for the play. next idea I'd love to see: professors getting grants/cloud credits to teach classes on the gcloud
- sashank_1509 2y agoDuring grad school, quite a few professors had access to TPU’s from Google Cloud Research Program. I imagine with LLM scale now, it would be much harder to get access, but still possible if you’re from a big name institution.
- chazeon 2y agoThis is already happening.
- MattGaiser 2y agoIsn't this pretty standard? As a student I got plenty of cloud credit.
- fragmede 2y ago> If you're a faculty member at an eligible institution, you can apply for Google Cloud education credits to teach using Google Cloud. The credits grant you a spending allowance as a Cloud Billing account credit, and can be used for all Google Cloud services https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/edu-grants#:~:text=If%20you're%20a%20faculty%20member%20at%20an%20eligible%20institution,for%20all%20Google%20Cloud%20services https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/edu-grants#:~:t....
- latchkey 2y agoThis is fun validation for what I've been working on for the last year! My startup (Hot Aisle) is all about building, managing and deploying dedicated compute clusters for businesses. At the enterprise level of compute, there is a lot that goes into making this happen, so we are effectively the capex / opex for businesses that don't want to do this themselves, but want to have a lot more control over the compute they are running on. The twist is that while we can deploy any compute that our customers want, we are starting with AMD instead of Nvidia. The goal is to work towards offering alternatives to a single provider of compute for all of AI. You can't do this for others unless you also do it for yourself. As such, we're building our own first cluster of 16x Dell chassis with 128 MI300x GPUs deployed into a Tier 5 data center as our initial rollout. Full technical details are on our website. It has been a long road to get here and we hope to be online and available for rental at the end of this month. One of my goals has also been to get Dell / AMD / Advizex (our var) to offer compute credits on our cluster. Those credits would then get turned around into future purchases to grow into more clusters. It becomes a developer flywheel... the more developers on the hardware, the more hardware needed, the more we buy. This is something unfamiliar to their existing models, so wish me luck in convincing them. Hopefully this announcement helps my story. =) Edit: Getting downvoted. Would love to hear some dialog for why. I don't really consider this an advertisement, so apologies if you're clicking that button for that reason. I'm really just excited about learning about validation of my business model and explaining why.
- reaperman 2y agoEven if it did feel like an advertisement, it's on topic for this discussion and adds something. That said, maybe it's a bit hard to read? Something about the flow throws me off - that could contribute to downvotes. I don't know.
- zhyder 2y agoThis link doesn't indicate the credits are exclusive to YC, seems they're open to all AI startups: https://cloud.google.com/startup/apply https://cloud.google.com/startup/apply
- Astroboy007 2y agoWhile that is true. They state that they are specifically giving every YC company this deal. So you won’t have to hope that they accept you into their program, once you’re in yc you’re guaranteed it.
- sieabahlpark 2y agoHonestly I see this as anti-competitive of Google to award only YC companies this benefit. All, specific, or none.
- sokoloff 2y agoI see this as competitive rather than anti-competitive. Google does not have a monopoly position here and is competing to become the supplier to these startups. That’s a well-functioning market, I think.
- chrisandchris 2y agoI see it as advantage for their competitors, they'll waste so much money on hyped AI startups others can invest in other thing.
- eru 2y agoWhy? Google doesn't have any monopoly on compute clusters, in fact they aren't even the market leader. (And for all we know, Google is willing to offer similar deals to other accelerators in return for some compensation.)
- jgalt212 2y agoor to boost cloud revenues. one can argue the half the value prop from Google's perspective of AI in the search bar is to pump of cloud revs. After all, an AI search result probably costs 100x to deliver than the standard one.
- CheekyBlunders 2y agoAny interest in SOCOM (DoD)?
- LarsDu88 2y agoThis is great deal for Google and YC startups.
- sashank_1509 2y agoIn a startup I worked we received: 230k Google cloud credits, and 180k AWS credits no questions asked. Especially when your company is pre product and not scaling, these cloud credits allow you to iterate rapidly
- bankcust08385 2y agoThe crack dealers want startups to get hooked so they can't or won't consider scaling to real, cheaper metal when/if their usage stabilize. Disclaimer: Former AWS consultant
- PJones2000 2y agoWe got AWS credits too, but when we wanted to do some serious ML there were never any machines available. Our contact person at AWS just stopped replying to emails when we raised this. While one shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, it was just a waste of time and we had more success elsewhere.
- sashank_1509 2y agoWe’ve not had issues getting T4 GPU instances from AWS. We faced difficulties provisioning A100 and AWS is annoying that the 2 tiers are either T4 or directly A100’s I think. We use AWS GPU machines for our CI but for serious ML training workloads we use GCP L4 GPU instances. Even in GCP we couldn’t provision or A or H100 (our quota itself is just 1 GPU of these instances) but we’ve never had issues provisioning L4 GPU’s and I think that’s enough for smaller not LLM Scale Models. For LLM scale startups, it’s tough provisioning GPU’s even if you have money. (We’re based in Bay Area btw)
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- playacools 2y agoDid you try this? We've had good luck using capacity blocks, they always seem to have some A100s and H100s available in the next few days. You can just get them yourself, don't have to wait for someone from AWS to help you. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-capacity-blocks.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-capa...
- Catenu 2y agoI believe these deals are crucial for attracting people. In my experience, they play a significant role in helping early-stage startups get off the ground.
- NKosmatos 2y agoI know I’m going to be heavily downvoted because not all people have the same sense of humor, but I’m going to make the comment… Does this mean we’ll have a new server to host HN and also get native dark mode? P.S. Yes I know that the server requirements are very low (explained by dang and others) and I also know there are many plugins and hacks to get dark mode ;-)