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Going from a company with no experience building and operating datacenters to a company with 100B worth of compute is a multi-decade high risk goal.

MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
xAI built a datacenter in a few weeks, if I remember correctly.
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
  And they used illegal power to do it (which will now give local poor people health disorders at 4x the national average). They likely violated every law possible in the process, like OSHA standards, overtime. Musk loves to overwork people.
- MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
  xAI built the Colossus data center in 122 days (just the physical construction time). Colossus initially had ~200k GPUs. 100B buys you ~1 million high end GPUs running 24/7 for a year at AWS retail prices.
  - Aurornis 6mo ago
    Initial Colossus buildout was 100K GPUs They also reused an existing building that happened to be in the right place at the right time. The larger data center buildouts would almost always need new, dedicated construction.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  That’s PR hype. They built it quickly, but they didn’t go from deciding they wanted a data center to having it running in weeks. You can’t even get the hardware at that scale without months or years of order lead time. NVidia doesn’t have warehouses full of compute hardware waiting for someone to come get it. They also reused an existing building. Basically, they put 100,000 GPUs into a building and attached the necessary infrastructure in about half a year. Impressive, but it’s not the same as a $10B/year data center usage commitment like this deal.
  - imtringued 6mo ago
    Why does this matter? The deal is supposed to last 10 years. If you don't pay AWS to order Nvidia GPUs for you, Nvidia won't have to deliver them to AWS, they will have exactly the same quantity of GPUs, but this time they can deliver to you.
    - drw85 6mo ago
      Because you can spend your 100 billion dollars spread over 10 years. If you build datacenters, you have to spend that money now. They're also not paying amazon to order GPUs, they're paying for compute usage of whatever hardware they have.

MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago

xAI built a datacenter in a few weeks, if I remember correctly.

0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
And they used illegal power to do it (which will now give local poor people health disorders at 4x the national average). They likely violated every law possible in the process, like OSHA standards, overtime. Musk loves to overwork people.
MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
xAI built the Colossus data center in 122 days (just the physical construction time). Colossus initially had ~200k GPUs. 100B buys you ~1 million high end GPUs running 24/7 for a year at AWS retail prices.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  Initial Colossus buildout was 100K GPUs They also reused an existing building that happened to be in the right place at the right time. The larger data center buildouts would almost always need new, dedicated construction.
Aurornis 6mo ago
That’s PR hype. They built it quickly, but they didn’t go from deciding they wanted a data center to having it running in weeks. You can’t even get the hardware at that scale without months or years of order lead time. NVidia doesn’t have warehouses full of compute hardware waiting for someone to come get it. They also reused an existing building. Basically, they put 100,000 GPUs into a building and attached the necessary infrastructure in about half a year. Impressive, but it’s not the same as a $10B/year data center usage commitment like this deal.
- imtringued 6mo ago
  Why does this matter? The deal is supposed to last 10 years. If you don't pay AWS to order Nvidia GPUs for you, Nvidia won't have to deliver them to AWS, they will have exactly the same quantity of GPUs, but this time they can deliver to you.
  - drw85 6mo ago
    Because you can spend your 100 billion dollars spread over 10 years. If you build datacenters, you have to spend that money now. They're also not paying amazon to order GPUs, they're paying for compute usage of whatever hardware they have.