[arnaudsm]

Genuine question : why are hyperscalers like OpenAI and Oracle raising hundreds of billions ? Isn't their current infra enough ?

Naive napkin math : a GB200 NVL72 is 3M$, can serve ~7000 concurrent users of gpt4o (rumored to be 1400B A200B), and ChatGPT has ~10M concurrent peak users. That's only ~4B$ of infra.

Are they trying to brute-force AGI with larger models, knowing that gpt4.5 failed at this, and deepseek & qwen3 proved small MoE can reach frontier performance ? Or is my math 2 orders of magnitude off ?

[Noaidi]

They are raising the money because they can. While these businesses may go bankrupt, many people who ran these businesses will make hundreds of millions of dollars.

Either that or AGI is not the goal, rather it’s they want to function for, and profit off of , a surveillance state that might be much more valuable in the short term.

[ACCount37]

As a rule: inference is very profitable, frontier R&D is the money pit.

They need the money to keep pushing the envelope and building better AIs. And the better their AIs get, the more infra they'll need to keep up with the inference demand.

GPT-4.5's issue was that it wasn't deployable at scale - unlike the more experimental reasoning models, which delivered better task-specific performance without demanding that much more compute.

Scale is inevitable though - we'll see production AIs reach the scale of GPT-4.5 pretty soon. Newer hardware like GB200 enables that kind of thing.

[lazide]

Their valuation projection spreadsheets call for it. If they touch those spreadsheets, a bunch of other things break (including their ability to be super-duper-crazy-rich), so don’t touch them.