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smuhakg • today at 12:51 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

> The only real systemic risk is the risk of for some reason not needing any data centers.

How is this not a systemic risk? Asserting that:

> There's still a need for data centers to host non-AI servers.

Isn't true because a NVL72 rack consumes 23x the power of a traditional server rack which is why there's new construction. You could retrofit such a datacenter with normal servers but then you're taking a loss on the GPUs which is the majority of the cost.

https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-datacenter-cost-breakdown


Replies

treis • today at 3:32 AM

It's not a systemic risk because outside of society collapsing we are going to use lots of data centers regardless of what happens with AI.

At this point the question isn't really if we're going to use the GPUs they're building out. The question is how much profit they are going to make. I've seen people show margins as high as 80% on inference. That's a lot of headroom before we see data centers being shut down.

hnav • today at 1:30 AM

Wonder if we'll see ultra-dense CPU compute (1000s of cores in 1U) to take advantage of this power density whether the AI bubble pops or not.

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