The analyst behind this essay thinks there's no way the AI data centre boom can be profitable.
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The analyst behind this essay thinks there's no way the AI data centre boom can be profitable. I looked at their expectations and … they're optimistic: those number crunchers in the data centres won't depreciate over 3-5 years, they'll be obsolete inside 18 months!
It's ridiculous.
https://awful.systems/comment/9041013 -
The analyst behind this essay thinks there's no way the AI data centre boom can be profitable. I looked at their expectations and … they're optimistic: those number crunchers in the data centres won't depreciate over 3-5 years, they'll be obsolete inside 18 months!
It's ridiculous.
https://awful.systems/comment/9041013@cstross when the Great Recession happened they shipped my factories equipment on the back of semi trailers and drove it all the New Mexico. Could we see the same in stripping the DCs for parts immediately so they get most recompense for that sunk cost?
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undefined Oblomov shared this topic on
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@cstross when the Great Recession happened they shipped my factories equipment on the back of semi trailers and drove it all the New Mexico. Could we see the same in stripping the DCs for parts immediately so they get most recompense for that sunk cost?
@suzannealdrich When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, suddenly you couldn't look at eBay without being bombarded with *really cheap* second hand Aeron chairs at about a quarter the original price when they were new, two years earlier. (I bought a bunch for my home office.) "Most recompence" will be maybe 25%, at best, and most of the stuff is special-purpose so not saleable. How many homes or small businesses really need a 100kW 19" equipment rack? Let alone a thousand of them?
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@suzannealdrich When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, suddenly you couldn't look at eBay without being bombarded with *really cheap* second hand Aeron chairs at about a quarter the original price when they were new, two years earlier. (I bought a bunch for my home office.) "Most recompence" will be maybe 25%, at best, and most of the stuff is special-purpose so not saleable. How many homes or small businesses really need a 100kW 19" equipment rack? Let alone a thousand of them?
@cstross weelllllll…… lots of people want mini labs, and maybe half racks would be fine for that. You could also get some GPUs and make adapters to o make them useful for a bit.
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The analyst behind this essay thinks there's no way the AI data centre boom can be profitable. I looked at their expectations and … they're optimistic: those number crunchers in the data centres won't depreciate over 3-5 years, they'll be obsolete inside 18 months!
It's ridiculous.
https://awful.systems/comment/9041013I’m old enough to remember Intel Online Services when Intel caught the .com bubble fever and spun up a global data centre build out believing (correctly as it turned out) that using ‘managed modular compute services’ (what we now call the Cloud) was the future. But they got the timeline badly wrong.
They overspent wildly and got toasted in the dot com crash in 2001, selling it all off in a fire sale in 2002 basically writing off the billions invested.
And this is waaay worse.
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undefined TiTiNoNero :__: shared this topic on
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@cstross weelllllll…… lots of people want mini labs, and maybe half racks would be fine for that. You could also get some GPUs and make adapters to o make them useful for a bit.
@suzannealdrich
The infrastructure needed to keep these machines happy is nontrivial. Each single server hosting eight graphics cards is north of a half million new, so even at ten cents on the dollar they're the cost of a new car and they're mostly designed to be used in clusters of at least eight and generally more like 64. They only have boot drives in the machine, if that, so you need an external storage server. The network cables they use run $600 for 3m. The switches run into the six figures too. The new hardware is designed for rack scale water cooling, so you're going to need to build a car-sized heat exchanger unless you want to literally just run all the faucets in your house wide open all day. And a half rack is still going to draw at least ten times what the entire rest of your house does.
@cstross