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It would be nice if the article cited the actual contracts the labs have signed so that others could also read them and draw their own conclusions (maybe it doe
by bradfa 1mo ago
It would be nice if the article cited the actual contracts the labs have signed so that others could also read them and draw their own conclusions (maybe it does and I got tired of the slop-like writing style too early?).
Are the contracts actually take-or-pay-style? What are the terms? What are the amounts of compute and money involved for each future time period? What happens if the datacenter costs spiral upwards? What happens to the datacenter investment if the buyer goes bankrupt, goes public, or gets acquired (potentially by the datacenter owner)?
I personally think the datacenter build-outs are going to generally be a big swing and a miss. The problem 1-2 years ago was making models good enough to be useful for a variety of tasks. Now we have that. The next problem is making the models efficient enough to run a profitable business. Recent Chinese lab model releases (because they're already constrained on compute resources) and OpenAI price cuts on Luna seem to indicate that this transition to chasing efficiency has already started.
- krona 1mo ago> The next problem is making the models efficient enough to run a profitable business. In that world, what does Oracle do with a bunch of data centres which 1. It needs to pay for and 2. nobody needs. This is what the article is about: building supply far in advance of demand.
- bradfa 1mo agoI don't know, but unless that contract is public, not many people know. I get the impression Oracle got a little bit of market pushback on the risk, as theirs seems to be one of the largest.
- krona 1mo agoWhat contract? It's mostly corporate debt. Seems pretty plain and simple to me. The contracts I guess you're talking about are compute obligations which frontier labs have. I don't need to know what those obligations are to know what happens to Oracle.