replace world with US

there is plenty of electricity in china

There's plenty. Electricity (and energy) is absurdly cheap in the modern world. 1GJ is roughly 10$. An H100 running 24/7 takes 20GJ/year, so that's 200$, which is orders of magnitude less than its retail price.

If energy wasn't cheap, you wouldn't see people driving large vanity SUVs around in the least economic way possible.

Something something something pride before a fall something.

It’s very much not true in all geographies.

It also requires major infrastructure to deliver that energy, which takes money and time to build, as do the datacenters.

"If cake weren't cheap, me and the other aristocrats wouldn't eat it daily"

Around 0.05-0.15% of the world population own such large SUVs.

Just FYI, there are around 360 mil SUV's on the road today around the world. Let's say 1/3 are "large", 120 mil. So, out of population of 8.3 bil, that's 1.4% or apx 3% of households. :-)

You mean there are places and times when electricity is cheap and available, and it if would last 24/365, then it would take 200$ to run such a card. The thing is: it is not available 24/356 in that quantity at that price.

Can I get a source on that please? I think the talk of not having enough power for the AI rollout refers to future needs not current demand.

There's plenty of electricity to run every GPU in the world, just maybe not enough electricity to run every GPU in the world and have poor people afford AC.

Great! How steep a discount can I get to take them off the hands of people who can't plug them in?

Right? This fever dream that there are boxes upon boxes of unused cards (some even claiming on this thread that it is 50% of GPUs sold) is utterly delusional. Some people want AI to go away so badly that they temporarily lose the ability to reason.

You're giving them a lot of leniency. Personally I get the impression many never had the ability to think in the first place, just imitate it by regurgitating what they've heard from others.

I try and give a lot of leniency because generally these people aren't stupid or meaning to be unpleasant, they are just scared. Which means sympathy, kindness and understanding is the likely cure. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

Because most hyperscaler projects are stalling. The number of datacenter chips number was way higher in Zitron's report.

While your datacenter is not built, guess where the AI chips are? That's correct. In boxes.

> While your datacenter is not built, guess where the AI chips are? That's correct. In boxes.

Are you sure about that? Might just as well be in Excel sheets only...

I'm willing to believe Amazon is sitting on bunch of unused GPU[1].

[1]https://www.techspot.com/news/114315-dark-gpus-amazon-show-l...

With the recent craziness, perhaps not all of it is as far from the truth as we might think? There could be quite a gap between units "sold" and units actually made...

If it were to be worse than channel stuffing — that is to say, if Nvidia has sold GPUs that exist only on paper — that would be beyond bad.

FWIW we absolutely know for sure that both AWS and Microsoft have racks upon racks of GPUs that are unused, if the cards are installed at all.

(AWS could have $20B of unused GPUs at this point — it's widely reported that there was at least $5B in August, with up to $3B more arriving each month)

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-nvidia-ai-gpu-data-ce...

We know that Satya Nadella has been open about how one of his big problems (as a CEO) is that he has bought GPUs he cannot plug in anywhere.

So 50%? Who knows. But if AWS and Microsoft can't plug them all in, why assume anyone else can?

The clear indication is that cold/dark GPUs delivered to major customers, GPUs that Nvidia has sold but still has on its shelves (buy and hold), and GPUs that Nvidia has sold, leased back from customers and may or may not have plugged into their own cloud, together represent a large enough proportion of sales to have pushed up the prices of GPUs and caused scarcity that is somewhat artificial.

If you take the scarcity of GPUs to be a solid proxy for assessing compute demand — or even for the sales of GPUs to be a solid proxy — then you are making a dangerous bet, IMO.

Step 1: wait for the financial bubble to pop

Step 2: still have money even though the financial bubble popped

Step 3: just buy them normally, at market prices

This is a preposterous statement to make.