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by jhide 56 days ago
They’re unclassified public cloud GPUs today, much the same as the massive industrial base of the United States was churning out harmless consumer widgets in 1939. Those widget makers happened to be reconfigurable into weapon makers, and so wartime production exploded from 2% to 40% of GDP in 5 years [1]. But the total industrial output of course didn’t expand by nearly that much.

I think it’s maybe plausible that private compute feels similar in the next do-or-die global war.

[1] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...
1 comments
bigfatkitten 56 days ago
The United States has almost no domestic capability to produce advanced semiconductors. There is no abundance of industrial capacity cranking out GPUs that can be quickly diverted from AI companies into weapon systems.

Even if private compute was at a level of maturity where you could use it for classified workloads, knowing that the infrastructure is being managed by someone in India or China, securely getting data into and out of that infrastructure is still a mostly unsolvable problem.

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jhide 55 days ago
My point is the existing private DCs can be reconfigured for a different use. Building new gpus is not required to on-shore compute. We already have it. Obviously if the military started contracting out compute onto the hyperscalar clusters it would involve a host of changes. I wasn’t aware that they were letting India and China manage their infrastructure… That seems exceedingly unlikely? That relationship would obviously be severed if the compute was reconfigured for the military.
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ungreased0675 55 days ago
The US is one of the very few countries with the ability to produce advanced semiconductors.
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etempleton 55 days ago
US is probably second only to Taiwan in terms of capacity to build advanced semiconductors and the gap is now closing as Intel gets back on track.
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tester756 55 days ago
wut? Intel with 18A can do it
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bigfatkitten 55 days ago
Its low yields and tiny volumes are part of what gets the US from “no capacity” to “almost no capacity.”
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tester756 55 days ago
yields are constantly improving on monthly basis, according to executives around 7% per month, so the capability is definitely there, but yields still needs some time
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