@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
Eleanor Saitta
@dymaxion@infosec.exchange
Posts
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The analyst behind this essay thinks there's no way the AI data centre boom can be profitable.