OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems

https://openai.com/index/openai-nvidia-systems-partnership/

by meetpateltech • 10 months ago

473 625 10 months ago

openai.com

eagerpace• 10 months ago

Where is Apple? Even from an investment perspective.

rubyfan2• 10 months ago

Being rationale.

fancyfredbot• 10 months ago

Rational.

brcmthrowaway• 10 months ago

Losing the race

richwater• 10 months ago

This is not something that can be won. The LLM architecture has been reaching it's limitations slowly but surely. New foundational models are now being tweaked for user engagement rather than productive output.

gpm3• 10 months ago

Right, but is the race to the pot of gold, or the stoplight (in which case by "losing" they save on gas)?

bertili2• 10 months ago

Apple doing fine and often spend the same 100B in a year buying back Apple stocks.

threetonesun• 10 months ago

My MacBook Pro runs local models better than anything else in the house and I have not yet needed to install a small nuclear reactor to run it, so, I feel like they're doing fine.

me551ah• 10 months ago

So OpenAI is breaking up with Microsoft and Azure?

freedomben• 10 months ago

They've been sleeping with Oracle too recently, so I don't think they're breaking up, just dipping a toe in the poly pool

jsheard2• 10 months ago

It's more resembling a Habsburg family tree at this point

https://bsky.app/profile/anthonycr.bsky.social/post/3lz7qtjy...

(pencil in another loop between Nvidia and OpenAI now)

sekai• 10 months ago

In true Bay Area fashion?

Handy-Man• 10 months ago

It was more like Microsoft refused to build the capacity OpenAI was asking for, so they gave them blessing to buy additional compute from others.

It does seem like Satya believes models will get commoditized, so no need to hitch themselves with OpenAI that strongly.

FinnKuhn3• 10 months ago

I would say Microsoft cheated on OpenAI first ;)

https://www.reuters.com/business/microsoft-use-some-ai-anthr...

mmmllm2• 10 months ago

Are Anthropic and Google breaking up with Nvidia?

ddtaylor3• 10 months ago

For someone who doesn't know what a gigawat worth of Nvidia systems is, how many high-end H100 or whatever does this get you? My estimates along with some poor-grade GPT research leads me to think it could be nearly 10 million? That does seem insane.

thrtythreeforty• 10 months ago

Safely in "millions of devices." The exact number depends on assumptions you make regarding all the supporting stuff, because typically the accelerators consume only a fraction of total power requirement. Even so, millions.

cj• 10 months ago

"GPUs per user" would be an interesting metric.

(Quick, inaccurate googling) says there will be "well over 1 million GPUs" by end of the year. With ~800 million users, that's 1 NVIDIA GPU per 800 people. If you estimate people are actively using ChatGPT 5% of the day (1.2 hours a day), you could say there's 1 GPU per 40 people in active use. Assuming consistent and even usage patterns.

That back of the envelope math isn't accurate, but interesting in the context of understanding just how much compute ChatGPT requires to operate.

Edit: I asked ChatGPT how many GPUs per user, and it spit out a bunch of calculations that estimates 1 GPU per ~3 concurrent users. Would love to see a more thorough/accurate break down.

skhameneh3• 10 months ago

Before reading your comment I did some napkin math using 600W per GPU: 10,000,000,000 / 600 = 16,666,666.66...

With varying consumption/TDP, could be significantly more, could be significantly less, but at least it gives a starting figure. This doesn't account for overhead like energy losses, burst/nominal/sustained, system overhead, and heat removal.

kristjansson• 10 months ago

B200 is 1kW+ TDP ;)

alphabetag6752• 10 months ago

It's easy to see what it could be by looking at Green500.

iamgopal• 10 months ago

and How much is that in terms of percentage of bitcoin network capacity ?

cedws2• 10 months ago

I'm also wondering what kind of threat this could be to PoW blockchains.

mrb• 10 months ago

Bitcoin mining consumes about 25 GW: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci so this single deal amounts to about 40% of that.

To be clear, I am comparing power consumption only. In terms of mining power, all these GPUs could only mine a negligible fraction of what all specialized Bitcoin ASIC mine.

Edit: some math I did out of sheer curiosity: a modern top-of-the-line GPU would mine BTC at about 10 Ghash/s (I don't think anyone tried but I wrote GPU mining software back in the day, and that is my estimate). Nvidia is on track to sell 50 million GPUs in 2025. If they were all mining, their combined compute power would be 500 Phash/s, which is 0.05% of Bitcoin's global mining capacity.

ProofHouse• 10 months ago

How much cable (and what kind) to connect them all? That number would be 100x the number of gpus. I would think they just clip on metal racks no cables but then I saw the xai data center that can blue wire cables everywhere

hbarka2• 10 months ago

It was announced last week that Nvidia acquired-hired a company that can connect more than 100,000 GPUs together as a cluster that can effectively serve as a single integrated system.

kingstnap2• 10 months ago

It's a ridiculous amount claimed for sure. If its 2 kW per it's around 5 million, and 1 to 2 kW is definitely the right ballpark at a system level.

The NVL72 is 72 chips is 120 kW total for the rack. If you throw in ~25 kW for cooling its pretty much exactly 2 kW each.

fuzzfactor7• 10 months ago

So each 2KW component is like a top-shelf space heater which the smart money never did want to run unless it was quite cold outside.

sandworm101• 10 months ago

At this scale, I would suggest that these numbers are for the entire data center rather than a sum of the processor demands. Also the "infrastructure partnership " language suggest more than just compute. So I would add cooling into the equation, which could be as much a half the power load, or more depending on where they intend to locate these datacenters.

awertjlkjl• 10 months ago

You could think of it as "as much power as is used by NYC and Chicago combined". Which is fucking insanely wasteful.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 10 months ago

I dunno.

Google is pretty useful.

It uses >15 TWh per year.

Theoretically, AI could be more useful than that.

Theoretically, in the future, it could be the same amount of useful (or much more) with substantially less power usage.

It could be a short-term crunch to pull-forward (slightly) AI advancements.

Additionally, I'm extremely skeptical they'll actually turn on this many chips using that much energy globally in a reasonable time-frame.

Saying that you're going to make that kind of investment is one thing. Actually getting the power for it is easier said than done.

VC "valuations" are already a joke. They're more like minimum valuations. If OpenAI is worth anywhere near it's current "valuations", Nvidia would be criminally negligent NOT to invest at a 90% discount (the marginal profit on their chips).

jazzyjackson2• 10 months ago

I mean if 10GW of GPUs gets us AGI and we cure cancer than that's cool, but I do get the feeling we're just getting uncannier chatbots and fully automated tiktok influencers

diego_sandoval• 10 months ago

Do you think the existence of NYC and Chicago is insanely wasteful?

alphabetag6752• 10 months ago

Account for around 3MW for every 1000 GPUs. So, 10GW is around 333 * 10 * 3MW so 3.33 * 1k * 1k GPUs, so around 3.33 M GPUs

az2262• 10 months ago

Vera Rubin will be about 2.5kw and Feynman will be about 4kw.

All-in, you’re looking at a higher footprint maybe 4-5kw per GPU blended.

So about 2 million GPUs.

gmm1990• 10 months ago

Strange unit of measurement. Who would find that more useful than expected compute or even just the number of chips.

credit_guy• 10 months ago

A point of reference is that the recently announced OpenAI-Oracle deal mentioned 4.5 GW. So this deal is more than twice as big.

leetharris• 10 months ago

Probably because you can't reliably predict how much compute this will lead to. Power generation is probably the limiting factor in intelligence explosion.

sedawkgrep• 10 months ago

That, and compute always goes up.

skhameneh3• 10 months ago

I wouldn't be surprised if power consumption is a starting point due to things like permitting and initial load planning.

I imagine this as a subtractive process starting with the maximum energy window.

zozbot234• 10 months ago

It's a very useful reference point actually because once you hit 1.21 GW the AI model begins to learn at a geometric rate and we finally get to real AGI. Last I've heard this was rumored as a prediction for AI 2027, so we're almost there already.

jsnell• 10 months ago

1.21GW is an absurd level of precision for this kind of prediction.

outside2344• 10 months ago

Is this a crafty reference to Back to the Future? If so I applaud you.

the_70x• 10 months ago

Came only here searching for 1.21GW

aprdm• 10 months ago

At large scales a lot of it is measured on power instead of compute, as power is the limitation

isoprophlex• 10 months ago

If a card costs x money, and operating it every year/whatever costs y money in electricity, and y >> x, it makes sense to mostly talk about the amount of electricity you are burning.

Because if some card with more FLOPS comes available, and the market will buy all your FLOPS regardless, you just swap it in at constant y / for no appreciable change in how much you're spending to operate.

(I have no idea if y is actually much larger than x)

ben_w4• 10 months ago

For a while, it's become increasingly clear that the current AI boom's growth curve rapidly hits the limits of the existing electricity supply.

Therefore, they are listing in terms of the critical limit: power.

Personally, I expect this to blow up first in the faces of normal people who find they can no longer keep their phones charged or their apartments lit at night, and only then will the current AI investment bubble pop.

xnx2• 10 months ago

What does this mean? "To support the partnership, NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed."

jstummbillig• 10 months ago

I am confused as to what the question is.

solarexplorer• 10 months ago

That they will invest 10$ in OpenAI for each W of NVIDIA chips that is deployed? EDIT: In steps of 1GW it seems.

re-thc• 10 months ago

What does this mean?
to invest up to

i.e. 0 to something something

losteric• 10 months ago

so nvidia's value supported by the value of AI companies, which nvidia then supports?

patapong• 10 months ago

Perhaps it means OpenAI will pay for the graphics card in stock? Nvidia would become an investor in OpenAI thereby moving up the AI value chain as well as ensuring demand for GPUs, while OpenAI would get millions of GPUs to scale their infrastructure.

vlovich1232• 10 months ago

Nvidia is buying their own chips and counting it as a sale. In exchange they’re maybe getting OpenAI stock that will be worth more in the future. Normally this would count as illegally cooking the books I think but if the OpenAI investment pays off no one will care.

toomuchtodo• 10 months ago

What if it doesn't?

dtech• 10 months ago

They're investing in kind. They're paying with chips instead of money

dsr_• 10 months ago

It means this is a bubble, and Nvidia is hoping that their friends in a white house will keep them from being prosecuted, of at least from substantial penalties.

mmmllm2• 10 months ago

They will transfer the money to buy their own chips right before each chip is purchased

isodev• 10 months ago

Strategic partnership enables OpenAI to build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI datacenters with NVIDIA systems representing millions of GPUs

I know watts but I really can’t quantify this. How much of Nvidia is there in the amount of servers that consume 10GW? Do they all use the same chip? What if there is newer chip that consumes less, does the deal imply more servers? Did GPT write this post?

mr_toad• 10 months ago

You don’t need AI to write vague waffly press releases. But to put this in perspective an H100 has a TDP of 700 watts, the newer B100s are 1000 watts I think?

Also, the idea of a newer Nvidia card using less power is très amusant.

nick__m• 10 months ago

A 72 GPUs NVL72 rack consumes up to 130kW, so it's a little more than 5 500 000 GPUs

az2262• 10 months ago

$150-200B worth of hardware. About 2 million GPUs.

So this investment is somewhat structured like the Microsoft investment where equity was traded for Azure compute.

hooloovoo_zoo• 10 months ago

These $ figures based on compute credits or the investor's own hardware seem pretty sketchy.

fufxufxutc2• 10 months ago

In accounting terms, this is a shady business practice known as "round tripping" where you invest in a company for the sole purpose of them buying your product. It allows you to count your revenue multiple times.

klysm• 10 months ago

Is it counting revenue multiple times? It's buying your own products really, but not sure how that counts as double counting revenue

fufxufxutc2• 10 months ago

The "investment" came from their revenue, and will be immediately counted in their revenue again.

lumost• 10 months ago

It's real revenue, but you are operating a fractional reserve revenue operation. If the person your investing in has trouble, or you have trouble - the whole thing falls over very fast.

rsstack• 10 months ago

Customer A pays you $100 for goods that cost you $10. You invest $100-$10=$90 in customer B so that they'll pay you $90 for goods that cost you $9. Your reported revenue is now $100+$90=$190, but the only money that entered the system is the original $100.

selectodude• 10 months ago

This is some Enron shit. Lets see NVDA mark to market these profits. Keep the spice flowing.

FinnKuhn3• 10 months ago

They for example did a similar deal with Nscale just last week.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/17/ai-startup-nscale-from-uk-is...

Aurornis2• 10 months ago

This is being done out in the open (we’re reading the press announcement) and will be factored into valuations.

Also, investing in OpenAI means they get equity in return, which is not a worthless asset. There is actual mutually beneficial trade occurring.

mxschumacher3• 10 months ago

what is OpenAI's durable, competitive advantage that differentiates it against the numerous other LLM providers? Investing at a $500bn valuation for a company that's losing money and has bad unit economics this seems rather aggressive.

landl0rd• 10 months ago

Nvidia has consistently done this with Coreweave, Nscale, really most of its balance sheet investments are like this. On the one hand there's a vaguely cogent rationale that they're a strategic investor and it sort of makes sense as an hardware-for-equity swap; on the other, it's obviously goosing revenue numbers. This is a bigger issue when it's $100B than with previous investments.

It's a good time to gently remind everyone that there are a whole pile of legal things one can do to change how a security looks "by the numbers" and this isn't even close to the shadiest. Heck some sell-side research makes what companies themselves do look benign.

yannyu• 10 months ago

A relevant joke, paraphrased from the internet:

Two economists are walking in a forest when they come across a pile of shit.

The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.

They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.

Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing."

"That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased total revenue by $200!"

hoosieree2• 10 months ago

This should go without saying but unfortunately it really doesn't these days:

This kind of corporate behavior is bad and will end up hurting somebody. If we're lucky the fallout will only hurt Nvidia. More likely it will end up hurting most taxpayers.

Mistletoe• 10 months ago

Isn’t our stock market basically propped up on this AI credits etc. house of cards right now?

rzerowan2• 10 months ago

Its the same loop de loop NVIDIA is doing with Coreweave as i understand.'Investing' in coreweave which then 'buys' NVIDIA merch for cloud rental , resulting in Coreweave being the top 4 customers of NVIDIA chips.

vessenes12• 10 months ago

Wait, why the quotes? NVDA sends cash, and the Coreweave spends it, no? I don’t think quotes are accurate, if they imply these transactions aren’t real, and material. At the end of the day, NVDA owns Coreweave stock, and actual, you know, physical hardware is put into data centers, and cash is wired.

rsync• 10 months ago

"In accounting terms, this is a shady business practice known as "round tripping" where you invest in a company for the sole purpose of them buying your product. It allows you to count your revenue multiple times."

... and we've seen this before in previous bubbles ...

mandeepj• 10 months ago

this is a shady business practice known as "round tripping" where you invest in a company for the sole purpose of them buying your product.

Microsoft and Google have been doing it for decades. Probably, MS started that practice.

GuB-42• 10 months ago

I don't really understand how it is round tripping.

In the end, Nvidia will have OpenAI shares, which are valuable, and OpenAI will have GPUs, which are also valuable. It is not fake revenue, the GPUs will be made, sold at market price, and used, they are not intended to be bought back and sold to another customer. And hopefully, these GPUs will be put to good use by OpenAI so that they can make a profit, which will give Nvidia some return on investment.

It doesn't look so different from a car loan, where the dealer lends you the money so that you can buy their car.

treis• 10 months ago

If OpenAI doesn't pan out than Nvidia has worthless OpenAI stock and OpenAI has a pile of mostly useless GPUs.

udkl3• 10 months ago

It looks like NVDIA looking to move up the value chain to have a stake in the even higher margin/addressable market instead of simply selling the tools.

nmfisher• 10 months ago

A dollar is always a dollar, so it's hard to claim that $1 million in revenue is actually worth $10 million. OpenAI shares, on the other hand, aren't publicly traded, so it's much easier to claim they're worth $10 million when noone would actually be willing to buy for more than $1 million.

It's not necessarily manipulative but it's also not exactly an arms-length purchase of GPUs on the open market.

t0mas882• 10 months ago

Oracle also announced a lot of future revenue from AI, while they're part of Stargate Partners that is investing in OpenAI. Similar deal...

bertili2• 10 months ago

Whats in it for Nvidia? At the recent 300B valuation, 25% equity?

searine• 10 months ago

I look forward to subsidizing this effort with my skyrocketing home power bill.

DebtDeflation• 10 months ago

Wouldn't Nvidia be better served investing the $100B in expanding GPU manufacturing capacity?

ecshafer• 10 months ago

By investing in TSMC? By buying TSMC? I don't think $100B would buy them enough current generation capacity to make a difference from scratch.

paxys8• 10 months ago

The don't have to pick just one.

vessenes12• 10 months ago

They’re already spending as much money as they possibly can on growth, and have no further use for cash currently - they’ve been doing share buybacks this year.

TheRealGL• 10 months ago

Did I miss the part where they mention the 10 large nuclear plants needed to power this new operation? Where's all the power coming from for this?

HDThoreaun• 10 months ago

Build this thing in the middle of the desert and you would need around 100 sq mile of solar panels + a fuck load of batteries for it to be energy independent. The solar farm would be around $10 billion which is probably far less than the gpus cost

boringg2• 10 months ago

Won't get you the necessary 4 9's uptime and energy sadly. Im still 100% for this -- but need another model for energy delivery.

xnx2• 10 months ago

Dissipating 10GW of heat is also a challenge in a sunny, hot, dry environment.

newyankee• 10 months ago

100 sq km should suffice

udkl3• 10 months ago

$10 billion is small change compare to the estimated all-inclusive cost of $10 billion for EACH 500MW data center ... $200 billion for 10GW.

catigula5• 10 months ago

Consumer electric grids.

delfinom• 10 months ago

Yep. Consumers are screwed and $500/month electric bills are coming for the average consumer within a year or two. We do not have the electricity available for this.

davis2• 10 months ago

Exactly this. This is essentially a new consumer tax in your electrical bill. The buildout of the electrical grid is being put on consumers essentially as a monthly tax with the increase in electrical costs. Everyone in the country is paying for the grid infrastructure to power these data centers owned by trillion dollar companies who aren't paying for their needs.

nutjob22• 10 months ago

Also, the fact they they announce not how much computing power they are going to deploy but rather how much electricity it's going to use (as if power usage is a useful measurement of processing power) is kind of gross.

"Good news everybody, your power bills are going up and your creaking, chronically underfunded infrastructure is even closer to collapse!"

hoosieree2• 10 months ago

Also water. You will be rationed, OpenAI will not.

https://www.newstarget.com/2025-08-02-texas-ai-data-centers-...

nitwit005• 10 months ago

I assumed this headline was not aimed at the public, but at some utility they want to convince to expand capacity. Otherwise, bragging about future power consumption seems a bit perplexing.

Ianjit• 10 months ago

Or to assuage investors participating in the OpenAI secondary on the issue of cash burn.

lumenwrites• 10 months ago

Yaay, one step closer to torment nexus.

nh23423fefe• 10 months ago

low effort comment, whose content is a stale reference to other low effort memes

andreicaayoha• 10 months ago

pls

zuInnp• 10 months ago

Yeah, who cares about the enviroment... who needs water and energy, if you AI agent can give you better pep talk

rlv-dan2• 10 months ago

Don't forget about better filters for influencers talking about the climate crisis!

tgv• 10 months ago

When fucking up the human mind isn't enough. This is really villainous.

And before you think that's nonsense, let's not forget these people are accelerationists. Destroying the fabric of society is their goal.

novaRom• 10 months ago

What's the purpose to have access to smart assistants if it doesn't result in improving your basic needs, not improving your quality of life? Who is spending now? Only high income households, while majority is struggling with high utility bills and grocery prices - very basic needs.

moduspol• 10 months ago

Waiting patiently for the Ed Zitron article on this...

nextworddev3• 10 months ago

He single-handedly cost people more than anyone with his bearish takes lol

topaz0• 10 months ago

Or he saved them more than anyone by limiting their losses when it does finally crash

mikhmha3• 10 months ago

Its not a good argument against him. I read his articles and he is absolutely correct about the state of things. Predicting the crash is a fools errand. I don't use that as a argument to discredit what he actually writes regarding the raw economics of the AI industry.

I say this as someone who has been holding NVDA stock since 2016 and can cash out for a large sum of money. To me its all theoretical money until I actually sell. I don't factor it into financial planning.

You don't see me being a cheerleader for NVDA. Even though I stand to gain a lot. I will still tell you that the current price is way too high and Jensen Huang has gotten high off his own supply and "celebrity status".

After all, we all can't buy NVDA stock and get rich off it. Is it truly possible for all 30,000+ NVDA employees to become multi-millionaires overnight? That's not how capitalism works.

gitremote• 10 months ago

When executives can't measure success by output, they measure success by input, a perverse incentive that rewards inefficiency.

Execs ask their employees to return to office, because they don't know how to measure good employee output.

Now OpenAI and Nvidia measure success by gigawatt input into AI instead of successful business outcomes from AI.

timmytokyo• 10 months ago

https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lzgt7up5ts2g

catigula5• 10 months ago

Can we get some laws to force these companies to start subsidizing the consumer grids they're pummeling?

The electric bills are getting out of hand.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 10 months ago

What will happen if/when the AI bubble pops and there is far more grid capacity than demand? Power plant bailouts?

davis2• 10 months ago

Load growth for the last 15 years has been very small but load growth going forward is expected to rise due to electrification of all things to decarbonize the economy. This means home heating, electrical cars, heavy industries, obviously data centers and the list goes on. So even if we have more grid capacity than demand (this seems unlikely), it will be used before too long.

JCM93• 10 months ago

Will just make capacity available for electrification of other infrastructure like heat pumps, electric cars, and so on. Lots of other folks would happily buy that power. The whole AI bubble is just driving up electricity pricing for everyone else at the moment.

vmg122• 10 months ago

They would build their own power lines / grid if they could.

bananapub• 10 months ago

... why? the current (heh) situation is that they do these big announcements and then local/state governments around the US get in a bidding war to try to shift costs from the datacenter operator on to their own citizens, in addition to offloading all of the capex.

catigula5• 10 months ago

No thanks, I'll just take subsidies to my bill.

aanet2• 10 months ago

I'm old enough to remember when vendor financing was both de rigueur and also frowned upon... (1990s: telecom sector, with all big players like Lucent, Nortel, Cisco, indulging in it, ending with the bust of 2001/2002, of course)

alephnerd2• 10 months ago

This absolutely feels like the Telco Bubble 2.0, and I've mentioned this on HN as well a couple times [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44069086

boringg2• 10 months ago

For sure a great infrastructure build out -- lets hope the leftover are better energy infrastructure so that whatever comes next in 7 years after the flame out has some great stuff to build on (similar to telco bubble 1.0) and less damaging to planet earth in the long arc.

lawlessone4• 10 months ago

Nvidia if you're listening give me 10K and i'll bu...*invest 10K+ 10 euro worth of cash in your product.

EcommerceFlow2• 10 months ago

If Solar can't compete with natural gas economically, and subsidizing solar ends up de-incentivizing natural gas production by artificially lowering energy prices, what's the solution here?

henearkr2• 10 months ago

Your question is weird.

Solar does compete economically with methane already, and it's only going to improve even more.

EcommerceFlow2• 10 months ago

If true, why aren't we mass scaling it all over the American West? We have railways running from West -> East, why not include power lines that can take power from energy farms in the West -> East? No major project in AZ, TX, or CA to give a city free power? etc

zitterbewegung3• 10 months ago

To put this into perspective this datacenter would have the land area of Monaco (740 acres) given assumptions of a 80kW/rack per case.

dguest2• 10 months ago

Monaco is 2 km^2 [1].

I'm confused because if I assume each rack takes up 1 square meter I get a much smaller footprint: around 12 hectares or 17 football fields.

And that assumes that the installation is one floor. I don't know much about data centers but I would have thought they'd stack them a bit.

Am I the only person who had to look up how big Monaco was?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaco

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10+GW+%2F+%2880kw+%2F+m...

zitterbewegung3• 10 months ago

My ChatGPT calculation is below. ChatGPT is factoring in the actually size of building and a campus and it have the range of 340 to 740 acres. https://chatgpt.com/share/68d195ff-3528-8004-8418-ec462b1433...

vessenes12• 10 months ago

So, basically a single BYD factory

oezi• 10 months ago

Monaco is so tiny it fits into Berlin's Tempelhofer Feld (a circular park inside the city).

ben_w4• 10 months ago

I mean, you're not wrong, but Tempelhofer is also a former airport, so had to be quite big. And since Brexit, Berlin is the biggest city in the EU.

ahmeneeroe-v2• 10 months ago

To put Monaco in perspective, the US could fit 4.8M Monacos

mhb• 10 months ago

To put Rhode Island in perspective, it would hold 1,340 Monacos.

https://www.comparea.org/MCO+US_RI

JCM93• 10 months ago

This is throwing more cards on the house of cards. Nvidia is “investing” in OpenAI so OpenAI can buy GPUs from NVidia. Textbook “round tripping.”

I generally like what’s been happening with AI but man this is gonna crash hard when reality sets in. We’re reaching the scary stage of a bubble where folks are forced to throw more and more cash on the fire to keep it going with no clear path to ever get that cash back. If anyone slows down, even just a bit, the whole thing goes critical and implodes.

anothermathbozo• 10 months ago

What is this a bubble on? What does said bubble collapsing look like?

Drunkfoowl• 10 months ago

High end server gpus and AI roi expectations.

shawabawa3• 10 months ago

AI and tech companies

Collapse might look a little like the dot com bubble (stock crashes, bankruptcies, layoffs, etc)

bitmasher92• 10 months ago

Nvidia is giving OpenAi money (through investment) to buy Nvidia chips. The bubble is that Nvidia got that money from its crazy high stock price, the extra investment raises OpenAi’s evaluation and the increased sells raises Nvidia’s evaluation. If the valuations see a correction then spending like this will decrease, further decreasing valuations.

Bubble collapsing looks like enshittification of OpenAI tools as they try to raise revenues. It’ll ripple all throughout tech as everyone is tied into LLMs, and capital will be harder to come by.

jenkinomics2• 10 months ago

I think ultimately the conclusion that we're in a bubble is bad analysis. It jumps over a chasm and assumes that analogy to past historical situations allows us to draw conclusions.

This isn't a bubble. This is the collapse of 300 years of modern capitalism into corporate techno feudalism.

This won't crash and lead to a recession or depression. We are at the end game. Look around you. Capital is going scorched earth on labor. They are winning. Cost of living in metropolitan areas is exploding, and most of us will end up begging for scraps in peripheral areas.

This is the result of everything the elites have been working towards for the past few decades. Climate catastrophe is the cherry on the cake: they will shock therapy us into the last few bits. There will be corporate citizenship that enables one to live as a demi-god at the behest of the owners, and survival in the wastelands for the rest of us.

jononor• 10 months ago

I do not think the leveraging is going to end there. I suspect this will be used to justify/secure power generation investments, possibly even nuclear. Likely via one or more of the OpenAI/Altman adjacent power startups.

amluto• 10 months ago

On the bright side, if lots of power capacity is added and most of the GPUs end up idle, then there might be cheap power available for other uses.

bobmcnamara• 10 months ago

Altman is all in on converting the solar system into a Dyson sphere to power OpenAI.

yibg• 10 months ago

Isn't that already happening via Oklo? Up 500%+ YTD.

resters• 10 months ago

At least the deal is denominated in watts rather than currency which may hyperinflate soon.

gdiamos• 10 months ago

It forces us to confront a question.

How much investment and prioritization in scaling laws is justified?

aldousd6662• 10 months ago

Regardless of the scaling hypothesis, they need the compute to serve the models at scale.

Jayakumark• 10 months ago

reminds me of this image https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F6...

paxys8• 10 months ago

It would be amusing if it also wasn't so accurate.

tobias3• 10 months ago

Same thing with the 1.3 billion EUR investment of ASML into Mistral. ASML -> Mistral -> NVIDIA -> TSMC -> ASML -> ...

vessenes12• 10 months ago

Almost every model trained by the majors has paid for itself with inference fees.

I’m not saying there isn’t a bubble, but I am saying if the researchers and strategists absolutely closest to the “metal” of realtime frontier models are correct that AGI is in reach, then this isn’t a bubble, it’s a highly rational race. One that large players seem to be winning right now.

mossTechnician• 10 months ago

Which of these model-making companies have posted a profit? I'm not familiar with any.

mountainriver3• 10 months ago

The idea that it’s a bubble on the frontier model side is insane. AI assisted coding alone makes it the most valuable thing we’ve ever created.

jsheard2• 10 months ago

Almost every model trained by the majors has paid for itself with inference fees.

Even if we assume this is true, the downstream customers paying for that inference also need it to pay for itself on average in order for the upstream model training to be sustainable, otherwise the demand for inference will dry up when the music stops. There won't always be a parade of over-funded AI startups burning $10 worth of tokens to bring in $1 of revenue.

sylario• 10 months ago

The thing is that AI researchers that are not focused on only LLM do not seem to think it is in reach.

ACCount372• 10 months ago

Ever since NLP and CSR, the two unassailable fortresses of every AI winter, fell to LLMs? I had no doubt that AGI is within reach.

It's less "will it happen" now, and more "whether it hits in a few decades or in a few years".

SilverElfin2• 10 months ago

I also recall reading that OpenAI is developing its own chips. What happened to that?

aldousd6662• 10 months ago

I don't think the NVIDIA deal is an exclusive one... They can still use TPUs and GPUs and other cloud providers if they like. They may still be planning to.

pixelready• 10 months ago

The real question is not whether this is a bubble since as you mentioned even if AI settles into a somewhat useful semi-mainstream tech, there is no way any of the likely outcomes can justify this level of investment.

The real question is what are we gonna do with all this cheap GPU compute when the bubble pops! Will high def game streaming finally have its time to shine? Will VFX outsource all of its render to the cloud? Will it meet the VR/AR hardware improvements in time to finally push the tech mainstream? Will it all just get re-routed back to crypto? Will someone come up with a more useful application of GPU compute?

halJordan• 10 months ago

Ai is already in semi-useful mainstream tech. There's a massive misunderstanding on this site (and other neo luddite sites) that somehow there is no "long tail" of business applications being transformed into ai applications.

ACCount372• 10 months ago

"The bubble will pop any minute now, any second, just you wait" is cope.

Even if AI somehow bucks the trend and stops advancing in leaps? It's still on track to be the most impactful technology since smartphones, if not since the Internet itself. And the likes of Nvidia? They're the Cisco of AI infrastructure.

big_toast• 10 months ago

Is this more of an accounting thing?

Is there some (tax?) efficiency where OpenAI could take money from another source, then pay it to Nvidia, and receive GPUs. But instead taking investment from Nvidia acts as a discount in some way.

(In addition to Nvidia being realistically the efficient/sole supplier of an input OpenAI currently needs. So this gives

  1. Nvidia an incentive to prioritize OpenAI and induces a win/win pricing component on Nvidia's GPU profit margin so OpenAI can bet on more GPUs now

  2. OpenAI some hedge on GPU pricing's effect on their valuations as the cost/margin fluctuates with new entrants

wmf5• 10 months ago

It sounds like Nvidia has so much cash already that they would prefer to own x% of OpenAI instead.

jedberg2• 10 months ago

It's interesting how deals like this are politically relevant. Nvidia refused to do deals like this (investing in companies buying large amounts of NVIDIA GPUs) after they got the hammer from Biden's SEC for self dealing due to their investment in Coreweave.

But now that there is a new SEC, they are doing a bunch of these deals. There is this one, which is huge. They also invested in Lambda, who is deploying Gigawatt scale datacenters of NVIDIA GPUs. And they are doing smaller deals too.

throwaway667555• 10 months ago

It's not round tripping. Economically Nvidia is investing property is OpenAI. It's not investing nothing, far from it.

glitchc• 10 months ago

Does this mean they pay for it through consumer GPU sales?

wmf5• 10 months ago

No, those are a drop in the bucket.

threeducks• 10 months ago

Last quarter, NVIDIA reported data-center revenue of $30.8 billion and gaming revenue of only $3.3 billion.

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...

This also explains why NVIDIA will not sell high VRAM consumer GPUs: it would cannibalize on their exorbitant data-center profits.

stale20023• 10 months ago

Does anyone in the finance business know how legal this all it? I am hearing terms like "round tripping" being thrown around. A practice where a company sells and buys back its own product to artificially inflate revenue.

I'm asking because its not just OpenAI that they are apparently doing this with, instead its with multiple other major GPU providers, like Coreweave.

And its just being done all out in the open? How?

yard20102• 10 months ago

How I see it - the people with the money make the rules, why would they make rules against themselves?

wmf5• 10 months ago

IANAL but you can do pretty much anything as long as it's disclosed. The only problem with round-tripping is doing it secretly.

As an investor you may decide that round-tripping is dumb but in that case your recourse is to sell the stock.

raincole• 10 months ago

First of all, it's not 'textbook round tripping' at all. The parent commenter is dead wrong but HNers upvote when they see "AI is a bubble."

Textbook round tripping is like: OpenAI buys GPUs from Nvidia. And the only reason it buys these GPUs is to resell it back to Nvidia, or just do nothing. It doesn't make it round tripping just because OpenAI is taking investment and buying stuff from Nvidia at the same time.

Unless you really believe OpenAI has no intention to use these GPUs for other purposes (like training GPT-6. I know, a crazy idea: OpenAI will train and release a model), it's not round tripping.

dummydummy1234• 10 months ago

My thought is think of all the really cheap compute that will be available to researchers. Sure, it will crash but at the end of the day there will be a huge glut of gpus that datacenters will be trying to rent out near cost.

I (as a uninformed rando) think that there are a lot of research ideas that have not been fully explored because doing a small training run takes 100k. If that drops to 1000, then there is a lot more opportunities to try new techniques.

koolala• 10 months ago

With this level of power usage it might be the opposite. Once they can't subsidize the cost it might increase.

zitterbewegung3• 10 months ago

I do think about this where they are creating a printing / cash burning cycle where both OpenAI keeps on doing raises and Nvidia can get more sales...

radium3d3• 10 months ago

Really curious how xAI is working out financially. Grok blows me away for coding.

radium3d3• 10 months ago

It's interesting how profitable Tesla is despite the huge investments in their AI training infrastructure. They seem to be one of the best positioned companies that can maintain enough profitability to be able to afford their AI infrastructure without issue.

Rebuff50072• 10 months ago

Sure, but its going to be a great plot for the movie that comes out in five years.

ivape• 10 months ago

You know you can sell inferencing at near 100% margins, right? More, even.

radu_floricica2• 10 months ago

But real GPUs are being built, installed and used. It's not paper money, it's just buying goods and services partly with stock. Which is a very solid and time honored tradition which happens to align incentives very well.

mgh9511• 10 months ago

What revenues do these GPUs generate for OpenAI? OpenAI is not currently profitable, and it is unclear if its business model will ever becomes profitable -- let alone profitable enough to justify this investment. Currently, this only works because the markets are willing to lend and let NVIDIA issue stock to cover the costs to manufacture the GPUs.

That's where the belief that we are in a bubble comes from.

belter4• 10 months ago

But real GPUs are being built, installed and used.

At this moment they could as well be called bitcoin or tulips....No different from Chinese ghost towns. Real houses being planned and built... And let's not talk to accountants about the depreciation rates on GPU Hardware that is out in 8 to 12 months...

dismalaf2• 10 months ago

No one's implying it's fake money or resources, only that will no clear path to profit eventually the money will stop flowing and valuations will implode.

kimixa• 10 months ago

But GPUs are a depreciating asset - if there's a bubble burst and your 5 million GPUs are idle for the next few years before demand picks up again, they'll be pretty outdated and of limited use.

Infrastructure tends to have much longer lifetimes. A lot of the telco infrastructure "overbuilt" during that boom is still used today - you can always blow new fibre, replace endpoints and all that without digging everything up again, which was the largest cost in the first place. Sure, in the above example you'll still the datacentre itself (and things like electricity connections and cooling) that can be reused, but that's a relatively small fraction of the total cost comparitively.

elorant• 10 months ago

Well I hope it crashes so we can get back to normalized GPU prices.

chairmansteve• 10 months ago

I agree that it is a bubble.

But the "round tripping" kind of makes sense. OpenAI is not listed, but if it was, some of the AI investment money would flow to it. So now, if you are an AI believer, NVidia is allocating some of that money for you.

truelson3• 10 months ago

Going to leave this link here: https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc250814/

By many different measures, we are at record valuations (though must be said, not P/E however). Tends not to end well. And housing prices are based on when mortgages were at 3% and have not reset accordingly. We are in everything bubble territory and have been.

rapsey10• 10 months ago

People are quite bearish and the stock market is making all time highs. This is actually a very good sign, because we are far from any euphoria.

Always keep in mind the old saying: pesimists get to be right and optimists get to be rich.

mrandish3• 10 months ago

Tends not to end well.

I'm no financial guru but this time around the boom/bust cycle, there's a new, additional factor that's concerning. Even though I sold my individual tech company shares a few years ago and diversified all my equity holdings in broad market ETFs like VTI, the so-called "Magnificent 7" tech companies have inflated so much, they now occupy a disproportionate percentage of even broad market ETFs which hold ~5,000 stocks based on their market caps. The obvious issue being their share prices all having a significant component elevated by the same thing - unrealistic AI growth expectations.

psunavy032• 10 months ago

Housing prices have not reset because of supply and demand. People are sitting on those 3 percent mortgages and not selling.

mrandish3• 10 months ago

throwing more cards on a house of cards.

Nice metaphor! Huge bubbles usually get a historical name like "Tulip Craze" or "Dot Com Crash" and when this bubble bursts "House of Cards" is a good candidate.

jama2115• 10 months ago

I just hope it works out just like the dot com crash in the long run - which is that the internet kept going and bringing real value it just needed a big market reset when it popped.

neilv• 10 months ago

Oh, I see now: house of cards (usual meaning) + throwing more cards on (like throwing money on the fire, and also how you destabilize house of card) + GPU cards in this case (even though they're not necessarily cards). I like it.

andai• 10 months ago

I think you have just described the global economy.

kelvinjps• 10 months ago

The're just buying and investing from each other?

jama2115• 10 months ago

Perhaps I should short openAI… would you try it?

jama2115• 10 months ago

I also ask this as a rationalist technique, the moment you ask “what outcome would you actually put money on” people suddenly get far more realistic about how confident they actually feel. You get a whole lot less “oh they’re DEFINITELY gonna fail/succeed!” type hyperbole when money is on the line.

crowcroft6• 10 months ago

It seems similar to how GE under Jack Welch would use their rock solid financials to take on low cost debt that they could lend out to suppliers who needed finance to purchase their products.

The biggest difference here though is that most of these moves seem to to involve direct investment and the movement of equity, not debt. I think this is an important distinction, because if things take a downturn debt is highly explosive (see GE during the GFC) whereas equity is not.

Not to say anyone wants to take a huge markdown on their equity, and there are real costs associated with designing, building, and powering GPUs which needs to be paid for, but Nvidia is also generating real revenue which likely covers that, I don't think they're funding much through debt? Tech tends to be very high margin so there's a lot of room to play if you're willing to just reduce your revenue (as opposed to taking on debt) in the short term.

Of course this means asset prices in the industry are going to get really tightly coupled, so if one starts to deflate it's likely that the market is going to wipe out a lot of value quickly and while there isn't an obvious debt bomb that will explode, I'm sure there's a landmine lying around somewhere...

paganel• 10 months ago

debt is highly explosive (see GE during the GFC) whereas equity is not.

Not as explosive as debt but I'd venture to say that nowadays equity is a lot more "inflamable" compared to 2008-2010, as in a lot more debt-like (which I think partly explains the current equity bubble in the US).

As in, there are lots and lots of investment funds/pension funds/other such like financial entities which are very heavily tied to the "performance" of equity, and I'm talking about trillions (at this point) of dollars, and if that equity were to get a, let's say, 20 or 30% hair-cut in a matter of two-three months (at most), then we'll for sure be back in October 2008 mode.

psunavy032• 10 months ago

GE also created their "rock-solid financials" by moving money around as necessary to make earnings projections.

phh• 10 months ago

Except I'm guessing they are not selling their equity, they are making debt backed by their equity?

eitally• 10 months ago

I'm not saying you're wrong, but with Nvidia pulling back from DGX Cloud, it makes sense that they'd continue to invest in their strategic partners (whether it's software companies like OpenAI or infrastructure vendors like Coreweave).

belter4• 10 months ago

Same as they are doing with CoreWeave. In a sane world the SEC would do something but we are past that. What about Boeing opening an airline company and selling airplanes to itself?

lacy_tinpot2• 10 months ago

This is more like reinvesting into the business as it's growing. It's a positive sum loop.

Nvidia makes money by selling to OpenAI. OpenAI makes money by selling a service to users that uses Nvidia. So Nvidia invests in the build out and expansion of the infrastructure that will use Nvidia.

This is a classic positive sum loop.

It's not that different than a company reinvesting revenue in growing the company.

binarymax• 10 months ago

But is OpenAI recouping this? I remember seeing reports a year ago that it was in the realm of $700M/mo in inference costs for them - are they earning that now?

Of course the strategy of taking a loss and reinvesting - but I don't see how OpenAI is making enough money to pay for all this, now or in the future.

cyanydeez• 10 months ago

Amells like yahoo driven 2000 bubble. Definitely short every ancillsry business involved

javiramos• 10 months ago

"...man this is gonna crash hard when reality sets in."

Given the amount of money invested and the expectations, the crash will be of cataclysmic proportions

mrcwinn• 10 months ago

Very foolish of them not to leverage SoftwareFPU. And with minimal effort Performas are rackable.

paxys8• 10 months ago

letter of intent for a landmark strategic partnership
intends to invest up to xxx progressively
preferred strategic compute and networking partner
work together to co-optimize their roadmaps
look forward to finalizing the details of this new phase of strategic partnership

I don't think I have seen so much meaningless corporate speak and so many outs in a public statement. "Yeah we'll maybe eventually do something cool".

BHSPitMonkey2• 10 months ago

NVDA's share price enjoyed a nice $6 bump today, so the announcement did what it was supposed to do.

In a sense, it's just an ask to public investors for added capital to do a thing, and evidently a number of investors found the pitch compelling enough.

paxys8• 10 months ago

Increase in share price doesn't provide extra cash to a company. They'd have to issue new shares for that.

casey22• 10 months ago

The "meaning" is clear, create FOMO among suckers.

labrador• 10 months ago

For scale: The 1960's era US Navy submarine I served on had a 78MW reactor, so 10GW is 128 nuclear submarines

dguest2• 10 months ago

A typical reactor core is 1 GW, so it's also one rather big nuclear power plant.

Muromec2• 10 months ago

More like two (and a half )

Muromec2• 10 months ago

Or just ten very safe РБМК reactors rated 1GW each (they can't explode).

fragmede• 10 months ago

You almost got me. RBMKs had this problem with large positive void coefficients that was buried by the Soviet Union, which lead to Chernobyl.

gehsty3• 10 months ago

Some more context, Nuclear power stations can be up to 2GW, offshore windfarms are seemingly hitting a plateau at ~1.5GW, individual turbines in operations now are 15MW. Grids are already strained, 525kV DC systems can transmit ~2GW of power per cable bundle…

Adding 10GW of offtake to any grid is going to cause significant problems and likely require CAPEX intensive upgrades (try buy 525kV dc cable from an established player and you are waiting until 2030+), as well as new generation for the power!

vessenes12• 10 months ago

Yeah the path forward here is going to be Apple-like vertical supply chain integration. There is absolutely no spare capacity in the infra side of electrical right now, at least in the US.

rlv-dan2• 10 months ago

In the long run, perhaps this will give us a better power grid, just like the dotcom bubble gave rise to broadband?

onesociety20224• 10 months ago

But that's assuming they actually have to transport power over long distances right? If they colocate these massive AI datacenters right next to the power generation plants, it should be cheap to transport the power. You don't need to upgrade massive sections of the grid and build long-distance power lines.

The xAI Colossus 2 1GW data centers seem to be located about ~20 miles from the power generation utility (https://semianalysis.com/2025/09/16/xais-colossus-2-first-gi...)

Recursing2• 10 months ago

For a better sense of scale: it's about 2% of the average US electricity consumption, and about the same as the average electricity consumption of the Netherlands (18 million people)

tonyhart7• 10 months ago

Wtf, and this is from 1 company

How many atrophic,xAi,google,Microsoft would be????

having around 5% entire country infrastructure on AI hardware seems excessive no???

udkl3• 10 months ago

For another sense of scale: A 500MW AI-centric datacenter could cost $10 billion or more to build. So 10GW is $200 billion!

HarHarVeryFunny3• 10 months ago

A big power station of any type is ~1GW. Nuclear is slow to build, so I'd have to guess natural gas.

happosai• 10 months ago

It should be illegal to build that much fossil fuel powerplants to just train LLMs.

The platant disregard of global warming by AI investors is truly repulsive.

gpm3• 10 months ago

The US is adding significantly more solar, and slightly more wind, than natural gas every year. This doesn't have to be placed where people already are, but can be placed where energy is the cheapest, which favours solar and wind substantially more than gas (or nuclear).

The reasonable (cost effective, can be done quickly) thing to do is put this wherever you can generate solar + wind the most reliably, build out a giant battery bank, and use the grid as a backup generator. Over time build a better and better connection to the grid to sell excess energy.

melenaboija• 10 months ago

This still blows my mind.

If each human brain consumes ~20W then 10 GW is like 500 M people, that sounds like a lot of thinking. Maybe LLMs are moving in the complete opposite direction and at some point something else will appear that vaporizes this inefficiency making all of this worthless.

I don’t know, just looking at insects like flies and all the information they manage to process with what I assume is a ridiculous amount of energy suggests to me there must be a more efficient way to ‘think’, lol.

sindriava3• 10 months ago

We know for a fact that current LLMs are massively inefficient, this is not a new thing. But every optimization you make will allow you to run more inference with this hardware, there's not a reason for it to make it meaningless any more than more efficient cars didn't obsolete roads.

pera• 10 months ago

10 gigawatts sounds ridiculously high, how can you estimate the actual usage? I guess they are not running at capacity 24/7 right? Because that would be more than the consumption of several European countries, like Finland and Belgium:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electri...

rawgabbit• 10 months ago

Does this affect OpenAI’s renegotiation of their deal with Microsoft?

lvl155• 10 months ago

We are definitely closer to the top in this market. Do people even realize what they’re predicting in terms of energy use? It’s going to be a wasteland territory sooner than people think.

webdevver• 10 months ago

its going to go 10x from where it is now

cainxinth• 10 months ago

Next Year: OpenAI announces it is seeking funding for a Dyson Sphere

BHSPitMonkey2• 10 months ago

The production rate of ~~paperclips~~ tokens isn't growing quickly enough!

wiseowise• 10 months ago

Where do I sign? Finally back to space race instead of era of social network degradation.

amlib• 10 months ago

I don't think it's a good idea to have the same sociopaths who brought us the current status quo be propping up a new space race...

pmdr2• 10 months ago

If I had shovels to sell, I'd definitely announce a strategic partnership to have a huge quarry dug by hand.

Seriously, is there anyone in the media keeping unbiased tabs on how much we're spending on summarizing emails and making creatives starve a little more?

CodingJeebus• 10 months ago

Ed Zitron is an AI skeptic from the market perspective, highly recommend his stuff. It’s definitely not comforting to read, but he’s doing the math behind these headlines and it’s not adding up at all[0]

0: https://www.wheresyoured.at/

pmdr2• 10 months ago

Yeah, I pretty much agree with what he's been doing. But he's not what the average person would call 'media,' so his reach is severely limited.

jlokier• 10 months ago

onlyrealcuzzo wrote:

Google is pretty useful. It uses 15 TWh per year.

15TWh per year is about 1.7GW.

Assuming the above figures, that means OpenAI and Nvidia new plan will consume about 5.8 Googles worth of power, by itself.

At that scale, there's a huge opportunity for ultra-low-power AI compute chips (compared with current GPUs), and right now there are several very promising technology pathways to it.

lukan• 10 months ago

" there's a huge opportunity for ultra-low-power AI compute chips (compared with current GPUs), and right now there are several very promising technology pathways to it"

Sharing an example would be nice. Of how much power reduction are we talking here?

OtherShrezzing• 10 months ago

This one datacenter should be able to perform a 51% attack on any of the big cryptocurrencies with that much compute.

An interesting hedge in case the AI bubble pops.

dgfitz• 10 months ago

Kansas City shuffle?

aurareturn6• 10 months ago

You're downvoted but it's a real threat. Imagine hackers or state sponsored entities use one of these mega data centers to destroy a few cryptocurrencies.

Lionga• 10 months ago

Nope, anything besides ASICs are useless for crypto mining.

typpilol4• 10 months ago

Someone did the math above and said all of it would only be about 0.05 percent for Bitcoin.

I'm not sure about the GPU pow coins though

hangonhn• 10 months ago

Anyone else find it fascinating that gigawatt/unit of power is the metric used for this deal?

iphone_elegance• 10 months ago

fancy stock buyback lol

truelson3• 10 months ago

Ben Thompson and Doug O'Laughlin ( https://stratechery.com/2025/the-oracle-inflection-point-app... (paywall), https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/capital-cycles-and-ai ) are calling it a bubble, largely because we've entered the cycle where cash flows aren't paying for it, but debt is (See Oracle. they won't be able to pay for their investment with cash flow).

I think even Byrne Hobart would agree (from his interview with Ben): -- Bubbles are this weird financial phenomenon where asset prices move in a way that does not seem justified by economic fundamentals. A lot of money pours into some industry, a lot of stuff gets built, and usually too much of it gets built and a bunch of people lose their shirts and a lot of very smart, sophisticated people are involved with the beginning, a lot of those people are selling at the peak, and a lot of people who are buying at the peak are less smart, less sophisticated, but they’ve been kind of taken in by the vibe and they’re buying at the wrong time and they lose their shirts, and that’s really bad. --

This is a classic bubble. It starts, builds, and ends the same way. The technology is valuable, but it gets overbought/overproduced. Still no telling when it may pop, but remember asset values across many categories are rich right now and this could hurt.

dboreham• 10 months ago

Perpetual Money Machine

softwaredoug• 10 months ago

How will this actually be powered? Just seems like we’re powering an ecological disaster.

seydor• 10 months ago

We are way past peak LLM and it shows. They are basically advertise spacing heating as if it's some sort of advancement, while the tech seems to have stagnated, and they re just making the horses faster. The market should have punished this

jama2115• 10 months ago

There will be a great market correction soon. Long term though it’ll still have some value, much like after the dot com crash the internet still remained useful. I hope.

nilkn• 10 months ago

It's 100% plausible and believable that there's going to be a spectacular bubble popping, but saying we are way past peak LLM would be like saying we were way past peak internet in 1999-2001 -- in reality, we weren't even remotely close to peak internet (and possibly still aren't). In fact, we were so far from the peak in 2001 that entire technological revolutions occurred many years later (e.g., smartphones) that just accelerated the pace even further in ways that would've been hard to imagine at the time. It's also important to note that AI is more than text-based LLMs -- self-driving cars and other forms of physical "embodied" AI are progressing at exponential pace, while entirely new compute form factors are only just now starting to emerge yet are almost certainly guaranteed to become pervasive as soon as possible (e.g., real AR glasses). Meanwhile, even plain-old text-based LLMs have not actually stagnated.

huijzer• 10 months ago

[flagged]

bwfan1232• 10 months ago

We are way past peak LLM

in the sense that all of the positive narrative is getting priced in.

MangoCoffee• 10 months ago

We are way past peak LLM and it shows

The dot com bubble saw crazy deals and valuations, followed by a crash.

some companies emerged from it and went on to be a giant company like Amazon. Let's hope this AI boom have some similar outcomes.

spacebanana7• 10 months ago

In hindsight, the dot com bubble was really the dot com dip.

tim3333• 10 months ago

Though "Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future" doesn't sound that off. LLMs may go but compute will live on. Bit like web portals and optical fiber.

danielfalbo• 10 months ago

And the bubble keeps bubble-ing

gloxkiqcza• 10 months ago

I’m really curious how this affects the consumer GPU market over the next few years. Sure, there has been a GPU shortage for a few years now but if this continues, there should be an absolute surplus of obsolete-gen enterprise GPUs flooding the market, right? Any ideas what limitations and benefits these cards might have for an enthusiast?

jama2115• 10 months ago

These systems aren’t easily converted into desktop style GPU’s, so it may not trickle down the way we hope

wmf5• 10 months ago

I assume surplus DGX A100 are already out there but they consume kilowatts so enthusiasts can't even plug them in.

dcchambers• 10 months ago

I feel like we're lucky Nvidia even sells consumer GPUs any more. At this point it's just a distraction to them and takes away resources they could be devoting to higher value hardware.

And the data center-class hardware doesn't do well in a home environment. It's not good for gaming. It runs hot and uses a ton of energy. Not to mention, silicon that is running hot 24/7 for years probably isn't the best thing to own second hand.

NooneAtAll32• 10 months ago

probably explains why we have "just rent H100 in the cloud, duh" influencers under every hardware building post on hn now

agentultra4• 10 months ago

Water is a critical resource in dwindling supplies in many water-stressed regions. These data centers have been known to suck up water supplies during active droughts. Is there anyone left at the EPA that gets a say in how we manage water for projects like this?

fatal_errr• 10 months ago

the e p what?

baggachipz• 10 months ago

The entire premise of The Simpsons Movie is an artifact of another time. Sigh.

deelowe3• 10 months ago

Water is much less of an issue than the media makes it out to be. It's a problem in some specific areas, yes, but power is a much better concern.

Manuel_D• 10 months ago

And even where water scarcity is a problem, heat exchangers can be configured to use wastewater. The Palo Verde plant does this.

MagicMoonlight• 10 months ago

Where is this water meme coming from? Surely the water is just pumped around, not actually used up?

p1mrx• 10 months ago

Evaporative cooling effectively "uses up" the water. It's possible to run chillers instead, but that consumes more electricity, and some power plants also use evaporative cooling.

thorncorona2• 10 months ago

We deplete our midwestern aquifers to make ethanol which we burn, and we grow almonds in California.

Both of those have significantly more water impact. Both of those are significantly less useful.

Why not focus on issues that matter.

AlecSchueler• 10 months ago

Why either/or? This is largely a tech forum so almond crops don't need to be the big area of focus or where we as a community can offer our best knowledge/coordination.

34679• 10 months ago

Food and fuel are significantly more useful than chatbots.

SilverElfin2• 10 months ago

Water pollution bigger danger than water usage. Look up videos of people whose water changes color after a data center was built nearby.

agentultra4• 10 months ago

They cause all kinds of problems. We could even include all of the new methane power plants that will likely need to be built.

sandspar• 10 months ago

Am I correct that your argument is something like, "AI endangers our water supply"? If so, what evidence would it take for you to change your mind? Maybe someone here can provide it.

agentultra4• 10 months ago

No.

The argument is that water management policy is lacking and supplies are dwindling, shouldn’t we have better oversight of this resource before we let corporations run full speed ahead?

dopa42365• 10 months ago

Some 1400 cubic kilometers of water evaporate every day on our blue planet here. The water isn't deleted, really.

agentultra4• 10 months ago

Ah you haven’t read the latest reports. We’re losing fresh water at a rate faster than models had anticipated. Once it joins the ocean, it takes a painfully long time to build up on land again. And with rising temperatures it’s not being retained on land as much.

World is getting thirsty.

cubefox4• 10 months ago

To the people who are calling this evidence of a bubble: There is no credible indication that AI in general is a bubble, even if not all investments will make sense in retrospect. Quite the opposite, the progress in the field over the last few years is staggering. AI systems are becoming superhuman at more and more tasks. It's only a question of time till AI will outperform us at everything.

mikhmha3• 10 months ago

There is no indication of being in a bubble when you're actually in one. Its only after the bubble pops do people recognize it in hindsight. Otherwise there would be no bubbles and we wouldn't see large institutions fall for this crap.

What is a credible indication? Who is credible? Its all subjective. Its possible to fool yourself endlessly when financial incentives are involved. The banks did it with mortgages.

jcranmer• 10 months ago

There is no credible indication that AI in general is a bubble, even if not all investments will make sense in retrospect.

If you add up all of the contracts that OpenAI is signing, it's buying something like $1 trillion/year worth of compute. To merely break even, it would have to make more money than literally every other company on the planet, fairly close to twice the current highest revenue company (Walmart, a retailer, which, yeah, there's a reason that has high revenue).

cubefox4• 10 months ago

They are aiming at being the first to develop an AGI and eventually superintelligence. Something that can replace human workers. Walmart is small fish in comparison. OpenAI is currently in the lead, so their chances are decent.

FrankyHollywood• 10 months ago

$100 billion, what a number. It makes me a bit cynical. The amount of useful developments you could finance in either clean energy, education, nature preservation, medicine, anything.

But no, let's build us a slightly better code generator.

Strange times we live in...

xyst• 10 months ago

This is awful. You should know the private companies building these datacenters often get back door deals with PUCs. They do NOT pay their fair share in their consumption and the extra cost is shouldered onto the general rate payers.

More degenerate "privatizing of the profits, socializing the profits" behavior. American public continues to get bent by billionaires and continue to elect folks that will gladly lube them up in preparation of that event.

elzbardico• 10 months ago

The good thing about this, is that when the AI bubble bursts, we will have a lot of energy infrastructure that wouldn't be built otherwise.

JoshGlazebrook• 10 months ago

No one ever talks about the electricity demands for powering these things. Electric bills here in NJ via PSEG have spiked over 50% and they are blaming increased demand from datacenters, yet they don't seem to charge datacenters more?

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/new-jersey-utilit...

lotsofpulp4• 10 months ago

That is on NJ government for allowing the price increases. They can easily say no.

bigwheels• 10 months ago

A classic political games move, and it says more about how much anti-consumer nonsense is tolerated in New Jersey than it does about power generation and distribution pricing realities.

The data centers will naturally consolidate in areas with competitive electricity pricing.

Gud• 10 months ago

Define, "competitive electricity pricing". Because surely this will make the electricity prices less competitive for the you and me...

m101• 10 months ago

This is called marginal pricing. Everyone pays the price of the marginal producer.

In some cases they try to get the data centres to pay for their infrastructure costs but the argument is that customers don't pay this normally but do so through usage fees over time.

ComputerGuru• 10 months ago

Framing it in gigawatts is very interesting given the controversy about skyrocketing electric prices for residential and small business users as a result of datacenters over the past three years, primarily driven by AI growth. If, as another commenter notes, this 10GW is how much Chicago and NYC use combined, then we need to have a serious discussion about where this power is going to come from given the dismal status of the USA's power grid and related infrastructure and the already exploding costs that have been shifted to residential users in order to guarantee electric supply to these biggest datacenters (so they can keep paying peanuts for electricity and avoid shouldering any of the infrastructural burden to maintain or improve the underlying grid/plants required to meet their massive power needs).

I'm not even anti-datacenter (wouldn't be here if I were), I just think there needs to be serious rebalancing of these costs because this increase in US residential electric prices in just five years (from 13¢ to 19¢, a ridiculous 46% increase) is neither fair nor sustainable.

So where is this 10GW electric supply going to come from and who is going to pay for it?

Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610

EDIT:

To everyone arguing this is how DCs are normally sized: yes, but normally it's not the company providing the compute for the DC owner that is giving these numbers. nVidia doesn't sell empty datacenters with power distribution networks, cooling, and little else; nVidia sells the GPUs that will stock that DC. This isn't a typical PR netnewswire bulletin "OpenAI announces new 10GW datacenter", this is "nvidia is providing xx compute for OpenAI". Anyway, all this is a segue from the question of power supply, consumption, grid expansion/stability, and who is paying for all that.

stogot• 10 months ago

I actually don’t like this measurement, as it’s vague and dilutes the announcement. Each product has a different efficiency of watts.

Imagine Ford announced “a strategic partnership with FedEx to deploy 10 giga-gallons of ICE vehicles”

mensetmanusman2• 10 months ago

It’s a sticky metric though because Moores law per power consumption died years ago.

randomNumber72• 10 months ago

I mean gigawatts is a concise metric to get a grasp of the amount of gpu compute they install, but the honesty seems a bit strange to me imo.

fuzzfactor7• 10 months ago

Total gigawatts is the maximum amount of power that can be supplied from the power generating station and consumed at the DC through the infrastructure and hardware as it was built.

Whether they use all those gigawatts and what they use them for would be considered optional and variable from time to time.

deelowe3• 10 months ago

DC infra is always allocated in terms of watts. From this number, everything else is extrapolated (e.g. rough IT load, cooling needed, etc).

elbasti2• 10 months ago

I work in the datacenter space. The power consumption of a data center is the "canonical" way to describe their size.

Almost every component in a datacenter is upgradeable—in fact, the compute itself only has a lifespan of ~5 years—but the power requirements are basically locked-in. A 200MW data center will always be a 200MW data center, even though the flops it computes will increase.

The fact that we use this unit really nails the fact that AI is basically refining energy.

pseudosavant2• 10 months ago

I love that term "refining energy". We need to plan for massive growth in electricity production to have the supply to refine.

reubenmorais• 10 months ago

All life is basically refining energy - standing up to entropy and temporarily winning the fight.

aurareturn6• 10 months ago

  A 200MW data center will always be a 200MW data center, even though the flops it computes will increase.

This here underscores how important TSMC's upcoming N2 node is. It only increases chip density by ~1.15x (very small relative to previous nodes advancements) but it uses 36% less energy at the same speed as N3 or 18% faster than N3 at the same energy. It's coming at the right time for AI chips used by consumers and energy starved data centers.

N2 is shaping up to be TSMC's most important node since N7.

kulahan• 10 months ago

That's pretty interesting. Is it just because the power channels are the most fundamental aspect of the building? I'm sorta surprised you can't rip out old cables and drop in new ones, or something to that effect, but I also know NOTHING about electricity.

jacquesm• 10 months ago

It is the opposite of refining energy. Electrical energy is steak, what leaves the datacenter is heat, the lowest form of energy that we might still have a use for in that concentration (but most likely we are just dumping it in the atmosphere).

Refining is taking a lower quality energy source and turning it into a higher quality one.

What you could argue is that it adds value to bits. But the bits themselves, their state is what matters, not the energy that transports them.

protocolture3• 10 months ago

This.

A local to me ~40W datacenter used to be in really high demand, and despite having excess rack space, had no excess power. It was crazy.

pabs32• 10 months ago

the power requirements are basically locked-in

Why is that? To do with the incoming power feed or something else?

casey22• 10 months ago

Where do the cards go after 5 years? I don't see a large surplus of mid sized cloud providers coming to buy them (cause AI isn't profitable), Maybe other countries (possibly illegally)? Flood the consumer market with cards they can't use? TSMCs' more than doubled packaging and they are planning on doubling again

pjc502• 10 months ago

Refining it into what? Stock prices?

gitpusher• 10 months ago

Framing it in gigawatts is very interesting given the controversy

Exactly. When I saw the headline I assumed it would contain some sort of ambitious green energy build-out, or at least a commitment to acquire X% of the energy from renewable sources. That's the only reason I can think to brag about energy consumption

7952• 10 months ago

Or this brings power and prestige to the country that hosts it. And it gives clout precisely because it is seemingly wasteful. Finding the energy is a problem for the civilian government who either go "drill baby drill" or throw wind/solar/nuclear at the problem.

paxys8• 10 months ago

Watt is the hottest new currency in big tech. Want to launch something big? You don't have to ask for dollars or headcount or servers or whatever else used to be the bottleneck in the past. There's plenty of all this to go around (and if not it can be easily bought). Success or failure now depends on whether you can beg and plead your way to getting a large enough kilowatt/megawatt allocation over every other team that's fighting for it. Everything is measured this way.

monkeydust• 10 months ago

Explains why Meta is entering power trading space

https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2025/09/22...

mensetmanusman2• 10 months ago

“ skyrocketing electric prices for residential and small business users as a result of datacenters over the past three years”

This is probably naïve. Prices skyrocketed in Germany for similar reasons before AI data centers were a thing.

paulsutter• 10 months ago

Datacenters need to provide their own power/storage, and connect to the grid just to trade excess energy or provide grid stability. Given the 5-7 year backlog of photovoltaic projects waiting for interconnect, the grid is kind of a dinosaur that needs to be routed around

abstractwater• 10 months ago

So where is this 10GW electric supply going to come from and who is going to pay for it?

I would also like to know. It's a LOT of power to supply. Nvidia does have a ~3% stake in Applied Digital, a bitcoin miner that pivoted to AI (also a "Preferred NVIDIA Cloud Partner") with facilities in North Dakota. So they might be involved for a fraction of those 10GW, but it seems like it will be a small fraction even with all the planned expansions.

https://www.investopedia.com/applied-digital-stock-soars-on-...

https://ir.applieddigital.com/news-events/press-releases/det...

dantillberg• 10 months ago

Prices of _everything_ went up over the past five years. Datacenter expansion was far from the main driver. Dollars and cents aren't worth what they used to be.

basilgohar• 10 months ago

Elsewhere it was mentioned that DCs pay less for electricity per Wh than residential customers. If that is the case, then it's not just about inflation, but also unfair pricing putting more of the infrastructure costs on residential customers whereas the demand increase is coming from commercial ones.

whatever1• 10 months ago

DCs need to align their training cycles with the peak of renewable power generation

justincormack• 10 months ago

They are starting to include batteries so they dont have to adjust to external factors

apimade• 10 months ago

An 8% increase y/o/y is quite substantial, however keep in mind globally we experienced the 2022 fuel shock. In Australia for example we saw energy prices double that year.

Although wholesale electricity prices show double-digit average year-on-year swings, their true long-run growth is closer to ~6% per year, slightly above wages at ~4% during the same period.

So power has become somewhat less affordable, but still remains a small share of household income. In other words, wage growth has absorbed much of the real impact, and power prices are still a fraction of household income.

You can make it sound shocking with statements like “In 1999, a household’s wholesale power cost was about $150 a year, in 2022, that same household would be charged more than $1,000, even as wages only grew 2.5x”, but the real impact (on average, obviously there are outliers and low income households are disproportionately impacted in areas where gov doesn’t subsidise) isn’t major.

https://www.aer.gov.au/industry/registers/charts/annual-volu...

atkailash• 10 months ago

I wouldn’t call a $100-270 electric bill a “fraction” when it’s about 5% post tax income. I use a single light on a timer and have a small apartment

Especially since these sorts of corporations can get tax breaks or har means of getting regulators to allow spreading the cost. Residential shouldn’t see any increase due to data centers, but they do, and will, supplement them while seeing minimal changes to infrastructure

When people are being told to minimize air conditioning but then these big datacenters are made and aren’t told “reduce your consumption” then it doesn’t matter how big or small the electric bill is, it’s supplementing a multi billion dollar corporation’s toy

bushbaba2• 10 months ago

6% YoY is much higher than the 2-3% inflation target

richrichardsson• 10 months ago

So a 6.6x increase in power bill, offset by a 2.5x wage increase has no major impact?

I'm sure none of the other outgoings for a household saw similar increases. /s

cavisne• 10 months ago

Utilities always need to justify rate increases with the regulator.

The bulk of cost increases come from the transition to renewable energy. You can check your local utility and see.

It’s very easy to make a huge customer like a data center directly pay the cost needed to serve them from the grid.

Generation of electricity is more complicated, the data centers pulling cheap power from Colombia river hydro are starting to compete with residential users.

Generation is a tiny fraction of electricity charges though.

mvanbaak• 10 months ago

0,19 per kwh. Damn man, here it is like 0,97 per kwh (Western Europe) … stop complaining

patrickmcnamara• 10 months ago

This is not true. The average in the EU is 0,287 €/kWh. I pay 0,34 €/kWh in Berlin.

Rexxar• 10 months ago

Regulated price in France:

- 0,1952 per kWh for uniform price.

- 0,1635 / 0,2081 for day/nigh pricing

- 0,1232 /... / 0,6468 for variable pricing

https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...

You have a very bad deal if you pay 0.97€ per kWh.

mullingitover2• 10 months ago

So where is this 10GW electric supply going to come from

If the US petro-regime wasn't fighting against cheap energy sources this would be a rounding error in the country's solar deployment.

China deployed 277GW of solar in 2024 and is accelerating, having deployed 212GW in the first half of 2025. 10 GW could be a pebble in the road, but instead it will be a boulder.

Voters should be livid that their power bills are going up instead of plummeting.

bushbaba2• 10 months ago

How would that solar power a DC at night or on a cloudy day? Energy storage isn’t cheap.

parineum2• 10 months ago

I'm living in one of the most expensive electricity markets in the US. It has a lot more to do with the state shutting down cheap petro energy (natural gas) and nuclear then replacing it with... tbd.

Saline95152• 10 months ago

Fyi capacity announced is very far from the real capacity when dealing with renewables. It's like saying that you bought a Ferrari so now you can drive at 300km/h on the road all of the time.

In mid latitudes, 1 GW of solar power produces around 5.5 GWh/day. So the "real" equivalent is a 0.23 GW gas or nuclear plant (even lower when accounting for storage losses).

But "China installed 63 GW-equivalent" of solar power is a bit less interesting, so we go for the fake figures ;-)

p1necone• 10 months ago

Theoretically couldn't you use all the waste heat from the data center to generate electricity again, making the "actual" consumption of the data center much lower?

Blackthorn• 10 months ago

No.

quasse• 10 months ago

Given that steam turbine efficiency depends on the temperature delta between steam input and condenser, unlikely unless you're somehow going to adapt Nvidia GPUs to run with cooling loop water at 250C+.

distances2• 10 months ago

In the Nordics the waste heat is used for district heating. This practical heat sink really favors northern countries for datacenter builds. In addition you usually get abundant water and lower population density (meaning easier to build renewables that have excess capacity).

pjc502• 10 months ago

Thermodynamics says no. In fact you have to spend energy to remove that heat from the cores.

(Things might be different if you had some sort of SiC process that let you run a GPU at 500C core temperatures, then you could start thinking of meaningful uses for that, but you'd still need a river or sea for the cool side just as you do for nuclear plants)

epolanski2• 10 months ago

is neither fair nor sustainable

That's half what I pay in Italy, I'm sure the richest country in the world will do fine.

FirmwareBurner• 10 months ago

I'm sure the richest country in the world will do fine.

You underestimate how addicted the US is to cheap energy and how wasteful it is at the same time.

Remember how your lifestyle always expands to fill the available resources no matter how good you have it? Well if tomorrow they'd have to pay EU prices, the country would have a war.

When you lived your entire life not caring about the energy bill or about saving energy, it's crippling to suddenly have scale back and be frugal even if that price would still be less than what other countries pay.

modo_mario• 10 months ago

Here in Belgium a stupid amount of that bill is hidden taxes. i kind of assume it's similar in Italy.

ianks• 10 months ago

To me, the question is less about “how do we make more energy” and more about “how do we make LLMs 100x more energy efficient.” Not saying this is an easy problem to solve, but it all seems like a stinky code smell.

sothatsit• 10 months ago

I'm pretty confident that if LLMs were made 100x more energy efficient, we would just build bigger LLMs or run more parallel inference. OpenAI's GPT-5 Pro could become the baseline, and their crazy expensive IMO model could become the Pro offering. Especially if that energy efficiency came with speedups as well (I would be surprised if it didn't). The demand for smarter models seems very strong.

XorNot2• 10 months ago

This feels like a return to the moment just before Deepseek when the market was feeling all fat and confident that "more GPUs == MOAR AI". They don't understand the science, so they really want a simple figure to point to that means "this is the winner".

Framing it in GW is just giving them what they want, even if it makes no sense.

apercu• 10 months ago

I had my highest power bill last month in 4 years, in a month that was unseasonably cool so no AC for most of the month. Why are we as citizens without equity in these businesses subsidizing the capital class?

0xTJ• 10 months ago

Stating compute scale in terms of power consumption is such a backwards metric to me, assuming that you're trying to portray is as something positive.

It's like selling steel by the average fractional number of mining deaths that went into producing it. Sure, at a given moment there will be some ratio between average deaths and steel, but that's a number that you want to be as low as possible.

dmoy• 10 months ago

Stating compute scale in terms of power consumption is exactly how one looks at data centers or capacity planning right now though. It's the major constraint.

It's just a different abstraction level.

brendoelfrendo3• 10 months ago

Where does this fit in with the $300 billion partnership between OpenAI and Oracle? You know, the one that also hasn't happened yet and catapulted Oracle's stock price through the stratosphere last week? Is that also getting built or is OpenAI partnering with Nvidia to get access to the GPUs that neither they nor Oracle currently own?

TheAlchemist• 10 months ago

Folks old enough to have been around in 2000 have seen this movie before.

If this was such a great business, money would be coming from outside and Nvidia would be using its profits to scale production. But they know it's not and once the bubble pops, they profit margin evaporates in months. So they keep the ball rolling - this is pretty much equivalent to buying the cards from ... themselves.

beastman82• 10 months ago

I only have an 600W computer

tim3333• 10 months ago

Mine is using 9W according to Coconut Battery and working fine for most purposes.

shmerl• 10 months ago

They should spend gigawatts on something more useful instead.

fennecbutt• 10 months ago

I do think that us humans are gonna cook ourselves on this planet.

However at least AI is doing _something_ with the energy. Cryptocurrency is such a fucking useless waste of energy I'd take anything over it.

sheerun• 10 months ago

t0lo• 10 months ago

"Hey, there's a bubble"

pyrophane• 10 months ago

So Nvidia is giving OpenAI money so OpenAI can buy more Nvidia GPUs?

2sk21• 10 months ago

Telecom vendors were doing exactly this before the dotcom crash of 2000

Brysonbw• 10 months ago

The infrastructure and energy required to power these systems at scale are critical. I hope we carefully consider the environmental impact of building and operating data centers. I’m optimistic that we will develop efficient and sustainable solutions to power the data centers of today and the future

rippeltippel• 10 months ago

Life was so much cheaper in the '80, when you could travel in time with just 1.21GW.

zmmmmm• 10 months ago

there's a worrying lack of structural integrity building up in this hype bubble and this adds more fuel to the fire.

You essentially have Nvidia propping up its own valuation here by being its own customer. If they sold a bunch of H100's to themselves and then put it as revenue on their books they'd be accused of fraud. Doing it this way is only slightly better.

gessha• 10 months ago

I feel like data center deployments is the new metric that companies choose to show growth vs the old headcount growth.

Nevermark3• 10 months ago

There are venture capital firms.

Nvidia is transforming into a venture GPU company. X GPUs for Y percent.

mxschumacher3• 10 months ago

openAI is far past the venture stage

mrheosuper2• 10 months ago

The Earth become warmer, and we spend a lot of money to make it 10GW faster warming.

mrheosuper2• 10 months ago

i am wondering do they still use 48v in those computers ? That's a lot of amp.

nicman23• 10 months ago

so like 3 racks of h100?

gorbypark• 10 months ago

That's a lot. I always had this idea in the back of my mind that British Columbia should get in on the AI game and try and get data centers located in BC because we generally have a lot of "excess" hydro generation capacity. There's a new mega dam recently opened that had lots of criticism about it being "unneeded".

That mega dam (Site C) produces 1.1GW of energy.

andirk• 10 months ago

Most salient point of all of this: gigawatts is pronounced "jigga watts", like Back to the Future's Doc does correctly.

rvz• 10 months ago

This is a dot-com level bubble.

tim3333• 10 months ago

Dotcom++

StapleHorse• 10 months ago

I wonder if all that heat could be harvested and reused in turbines. Maybe using industrial scale heat pumps. I don't know.

OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems

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