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There's definitely something fishy going on. Singapore only has about 2% of global data center capacity. It's floor space, power and transit costs are at least

There's definitely something fishy going on. Singapore only has about 2% of global data center capacity. It's floor space, power and transit costs are at least twice that of the US and EU making it an unattractive place to do model training. Nonethless, it accounted for 28% of NVIDIAs datacenter GPU sales.

janalsncm 2y ago
> 2% of global data center capacity Let’s call the dollars per square foot the “cost density”. The claim you are repeating from the interview I mentioned is that SG data centers have an unusually high cost density. What could account for that? It might be that there is a very expensive item (a state of the art GPU for example) taking up that space. Another option, as I mentioned above, is that these GPUs are running inference in Malaysia which is right across the river.
- scarab92 2y ago
  Perhaps, but SEA is a very expensive place to run GPUs. High power costs, no free cooling. Why wouldn't DeepSeek (or whoever) just export these to Northern China where power is cheap and the air is cold?
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    There are plenty of data centers in hot places all over the world. Also, if you have been to Singapore, these are not people who are at all afraid of using air conditioning.
_t9ow 2y ago
Here's a statement by NVIDIA: "The revenue associated with Singapore does not indicate diversion to China," a statement by Nvidia reads. "Our public filings report 'bill to' not 'ship to' locations of our customers. Many of our customers have business entities in Singapore and use those entities for products destined for the U.S. and the West. We insist that our partners comply with all applicable laws, and if we receive any information to the contrary, act accordingly." (Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/u-s-investigates-whether-deepseek-smuggled-nvidia-ai-gpus-via-singapore https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...)

janalsncm 2y ago

> 2% of global data center capacity Let’s call the dollars per square foot the “cost density”. The claim you are repeating from the interview I mentioned is that SG data centers have an unusually high cost density. What could account for that? It might be that there is a very expensive item (a state of the art GPU for example) taking up that space. Another option, as I mentioned above, is that these GPUs are running inference in Malaysia which is right across the river.

scarab92 2y ago
Perhaps, but SEA is a very expensive place to run GPUs. High power costs, no free cooling. Why wouldn't DeepSeek (or whoever) just export these to Northern China where power is cheap and the air is cold?
- janalsncm 2y ago
  There are plenty of data centers in hot places all over the world. Also, if you have been to Singapore, these are not people who are at all afraid of using air conditioning.

_t9ow 2y ago

Here's a statement by NVIDIA: "The revenue associated with Singapore does not indicate diversion to China," a statement by Nvidia reads. "Our public filings report 'bill to' not 'ship to' locations of our customers. Many of our customers have business entities in Singapore and use those entities for products destined for the U.S. and the West. We insist that our partners comply with all applicable laws, and if we receive any information to the contrary, act accordingly." (Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/u-s-investigates-whether-deepseek-smuggled-nvidia-ai-gpus-via-singapore https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...)