alt Hacker NewsYou seem to be wrong about this
> A typical one-gigawatt AI data center requires $38 billion in up-front capital expenditure (CapEx) and $0.9 billion in annual operating expenses (OpEx). If CapEx is annualized over each asset’s lifespan, the total cost of ownership equates to $8.5 billion per year. Servers dominate this cost at $5 billion per year, or 60% of the total. Operating costs are small by comparison: even energy, the largest OpEx category, costs only $0.6 billion per year.
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fcantournet • today at 2:28 PM
1 Gigawatt * 1 year = 8760 GWh * 0.8 load factor * $0.2 per kWh = $1.35B of only electricity.
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This is my heuristic for the capex split and effective lifetime of the asset it creates (I'm no expert of course, this is based on various reading):
- 20% Capex has ~20-year lifetime: The shell (land, building, cooling gear, rack mounts, power lines etc.).
- 80% Capex has ~3-year lifetime: The computers, including bulk commitments to power and maintain them.
And interest rates are why this split is a ticking time bomb. The sheer quantum of investment to build one is almost entirely debt funded (~90% of total outlay). I would guess the endgame would be bad even if the split for these entirely different asset classes is 50/50, which would be very generous, based on what I've understood.
Datacenter funding is extremely leveraged. For comparison, only some banks are allowed that much leverage for that size of capital, that too only if they have federal reserve backing. Even in such a case, the retail account holder (pseudo-investor, because our deposits are loans to someone else) has practically no downside protection. If the bank collapses you will lose everything.