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OpenAI's hunger for computing power
- neonate 1y agohttps://archive.md/OnsLK https://archive.md/OnsLK
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nelsonic 1y ago[flagged]
- bwfan123 1y ago> Definitely not a bubble. ;) When you square that with the total revenues of 6B in 1H.
- lemonlearnings 1y agoBitcoin: AI: Hold my beer.
- roenxi 1y agoThey haven't put ads in ChatGPT yet as far as I know. It doesn't really make sense to work off the raw revenue before they put the main revenue-raiser in. Search isn't a very impressive money maker either if we take AdWords out.
- sverhagen 1y agoI have a subscription. Dang, who does every profit model have to involve ads?
- fooker 1y agoBecause not everyone wants to pay for a subscription, certainly not the 5 billion Asians in any reasonable numbers. There's a reason Google and Facebook run the tech world as we know it.
- thereitgoes456 1y agoYou and everyone else seem to assume on faith that OpenAI's ads revenue is going to dwarf their subscription revenue -- but you're being suckered. If you do the math, you'll find it's not nearly as clear-cut as you think. Not impossible, but not a given.
- famouswaffles 1y ago>If you do the math On the contrary the math makes it very clear. They need a free user ARPU of $11 to 12 per quarter to be profitable with billions to spare. That's a low bar to clear for a platform with 700M+ Weekly Active Users who are more personal with it than any Google search.
- leptons 1y agoTheir total losses far exceed any revenue they are taking in.
- dgfitz 1y agoI also feel like there is a bubble. However, looking at it impartially, it seems to mean sama is planning on making more money. Which seems to conclude in ads are incoming.
- ares623 1y agoWe give a lot of shit when LLMs get lost in context, digging themselves deeper and deeper into illogical trains of thoughts. But is this sama doing the same thing. He CAN NOT stop and MUST NOT slow down. The slightest display of hesitation and doubt will make it all come crashing down. And everyone else is doing the same. It’s an international game of chicken.
- username223 1y ago> $16Bn in compute spend (rent) rising to $400bn in 4 years. Definitely not a bubble. ;) Just to put that in context, US GDP last year was about $30tn, and Apple's revenue was about $400bn. So Altman is saying he wants to spend around 1% of US GDP, or most of Apple's revenue, on compute alone in 2029. He's clearly using the "fire all your white collar employees" pitch deck at the very least, if not the "prepare to meet your Silicon God" one.
- vineyardmike 1y agoWhat is their angle with this? Surely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years? I’m sure the researchers there would love to do more research, with more compute, faster, but 20+x growth is not a practical expectation. Is the goal here to create a mad rush to build data centers, which should decrease their costs with more supply? Do they just want governments to step in and to help somehow? Is it part of marketing/hype? Is this trying to project confidence to investors on future revenue expectations?
- p1esk 1y agoSurely SamA doesn’t actually think that they’ll more than 20x their compute in a few years? If their goal is to train say, a 100T model on the whole youtube dataset they will need 20000x more compute. And that would be my goal if I were him.
- bix6 1y agoWhy 20000x more compute? I thought they were at approx 1T with current compute? Edit: looked it up. 10k+ times more for training compute. Sheesh. Get the Dyson sphere ready lol.
- esafak 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy6Dw9rOAFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy6Dw9rOAFQ
- indolering 1y agoNow I'm more on the side of him being delusional.
- zeroq 1y ago"At this point I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth." It's that dumbass at your work who thinks that solely because he landed a job that pays him more than their parents ever made combined in his early 20s he can school everyone on every topic imaginable, from nutrition to religion. Him and Elon makes way more than that dumbass so ego get inflated even more. I don't especially like Tucker Carlson, but I think the more screen time we'll give to this people with an open mic it's better for everyone to have a first hand experience of how detached from reality these people are.
- lemonlearnings 1y agohttps://archive.is/OnsLK https://archive.is/OnsLK
- lemonlearnings 1y agoToo big to fail is the goal. If the world is powered by openai but it aint making a profit in 2028 they can just put their "were a utility like water" facemask on and get bailed out.
- kortilla 1y agoThat’s a fun trope but it’s a terrible outcome for shareholders.
- jacquesm 1y agoGood.
- avs733 1y agoWhich means it will be made into a terrible outcome for everyone.
- throwaway290 1y agoshareholders like a business that can never fail...
- lemonlearnings 1y agoLess terrible than being allow to go bust though.
- stevenwoo 1y agoAt least in the USA, I think if consumers realized their power bills going up every year are tied to these new data centers, there would be more opposition to data centers going up politically. https://apnews.com/article/electricity-prices-data-centers-artificial-intelligence-fbf213a915fb574a4f3e5baaa7041c3a https://apnews.com/article/electricity-prices-data-centers-a... I don't know if the electricity markets work differently in other countries.
- MountDoom 1y agoTaxpayers subsidize data centers in many other ways. These are prestige projects for politicians, so they often get long-term tax breaks and other preferential treatment. I think it's part vanity, part a misunderstanding about the economic benefits of a datacenter (which are nearly nil, as they employ very few people and produce nothing for the local market), and part just a desire to score brownie points with wealthy corporations, which might mean donations, campaign support, or other perks for the politician who makes it happen.
- nakamoto_damacy 1y ago[flagged]
- artursapek 1y ago[flagged]
- nakamoto_damacy 1y agoIt's for your protection.
- hagbard_c 1y ago[flagged]
- bix6 1y ago[flagged]
- Drblessing 1y ago[flagged]
- qingcharles 1y agoI'd get a lot more done if I had half a trillion dollars and were best friends with the president of the United States.
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- Drblessing 1y agoThe AI-powered tiktok competitor is not going to be cheap on compute
- banandys 1y agoI mean yeah we all saw the video of him stealing gpus and getting arrested
- bgwalter 1y ago40% of global DRAM output: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-stargate-project-to-consume-up-to-40-percent-of-global-dram-output-inks-deal-with-samsung-and-sk-hynix-to-the-tune-of-up-to-900-000-wafers-per-month https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star... All for creating worthless TikTok videos with Sora 2, while we don't get graphics cards and DRAM and our electricity prices rise. Trump will get another "win" for "his" Stargate project. The meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung was NOT arranged by Altman, he is the messenger boy: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/samsung-sk-hynix-supply-memory-chips-openais-stargate-project-2025-10-01/ https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/samsung-sk-hy...
- johnnienaked 1y agoAnd our water runs out, and we pollute and destroy the planet past the point of no return. AI will fix it though?
- logtempo 1y agoHey, at least you'll be able to add that exterminated tigre specie in your postcard from your last adventure trip. And more water to that river, with some greener trees etc. All of that without leaving your home ofc.
- panta 1y agoOf course. According to Andreessen if you are not optimistic and worry about the environment are an "enemy" for the bright future ahead (while at the same time he puts Nick Land in the list of the "Saints"). These people are deranged psychopaths, why are we leaving them at the wheel?
- johnnienaked 1y agoSounds about right coming from the guy who plagiarized university research to make his billions
- mhh__ 1y ago
- Incipient 1y agoIs it just me, or does this extreme demand for compute imply they've realised the core tech is mostly stagnant, and needs compute to possibly scale towards anything AGI-like? (however unlikely that is).
- general1465 1y agoI see it the same way. It is like automotive manufacturer who is using bigger engines with more and more pistons and wondering how much bigger engine next model iteration will need to make it go faster and how many iterations until they will finally break the sound barrier. However their product is looking like a school-bus box on wheels which is going to rip itself apart long before even reaching the sound barrier.
- adventured 1y agoThey're substantially tied down by demand/usage right now. How much more compute would they need to allow all of their paying users unlimited access to their best model? And to enable that setup in such a way that it's actually very fast. The answer: they need resources far beyond what they have now. That's just to solve an existing problem. Then throw in Sora 4 and whatever else will exist in a few years, and the need to feed that monster. They couldn't come close to allowing Sora 2 unlimited for all of their paying customers - I'd hate to see what that would require. Then let the AI begin world building for every user (which is where this is going). It'll be decades before the resource demands actually flatten globally (at least 20-30 years, to get to global population saturation on usage; assuming the global population will begin to rapidly slow and then shrink). Hint: the solution to Fermi's Paradox is that we go into the box and we never come back out, because it's a lot more interesting for 99.9%+ of humanity than a bunch of repeating rocks in space that take a zillion years to reach. The core purpose of AI will be to world build for us, mentally (relaxation, stimulation, entertainment, social) in we go: the end. The same thing happens to any advanced beings that get to our level, there's little to nothing out there that we can reach of interest (and no, it doesn't matter if the HN crowd disagrees, what matters for this outcome are the masses), we'll definitely figure that out, and there's infinite stimulation/experience in the machine world by contrast.
- buyucu 1y agoWhy does OpenAI need so much more compute than everybody else? DeepSeek, Qwen and many others build competitive models that need much less capital.
- credit_guy 1y agoMost likely OpenAI has models at least as efficient as DeepSeek or Qwen. Cerebras offers both GPT-OSS-120B and Qwen3-235B-Instruct. Obviously, the second has twice as many parameters as the first, but that's the closest comparison I can find. The Qwen model is twice as large, but twice as slow (1400 tokens/second vs 3000) and 50% more expensive ($1.2 per million tokens vs $0.75). Now, OpenAI is running a proprietary model, and most likely it is much optimized than the free version they release for public use. [1] https://inference-docs.cerebras.ai/models/overview https://inference-docs.cerebras.ai/models/overview
- buyucu 1y agoInference is not the main cost driver, training and research is.
- credit_guy 1y agoI'm not sure that's still the case. It used to be the case, but I doubt it continues to be. OpenAI had $6.7 BN costs for the first half of 2025. I doubt they spent $3 BN in training and research. They have 700 million weekly users, and many of these users are really heavy users. Just taking myself: I probably consumed a few million tokens with GPT-5-Codex in the last 3 days alone. I am a heavy user, but I think there are users who burn through hundreds of times more tokens than me.
- matt-p 1y agoAbsolutely not true.
- yorwba 1y agoChinese companies need to pay much higher prices for the same GPUs, so they would need to charge more to make a profit, but it's difficult to charge more unless they have a much better product. So building massive data centers to gain market share is riskier for them. That said, Alibaba not releasing the weights for Qwen3-Max and announcing $53 billion in AI infrastructure spending https://www.reuters.com/world/china/alibaba-launches-qwen3-max-ai-model-with-more-than-trillion-parameters-2025-09-24/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/alibaba-launches-qwen3-m... suggests that they think they're now at a point where it makes sense to scale up. (The Reuters article mentions data centers in several countries, which I assume also helps work around high GPU prices in China.) Circling back to OpenAI: I don't think they're spending so much on infrastructure just because they want to train bigger models on more data, but moreso because they want to serve those bigger models to more customers using their services more intensively.
- selinkocalar 1y agoThe compute requirements for these models are getting wild!! We're already seeing costs become a real constraint for smaller companies trying to build AI features. And if you're building anything serious with AI, you're basically dependent on a handful of cloud providers who control the GPU supply.