Where did you get 2-3B from?
Colosus 2 GPU's alone were 18B
Total cost including construction, power and water treatment facility might be close to 25-30B.
I'm not OP but that was the cost of the initial facility if I remember correctly when it was first up and running, what you're describing I believe is the full cost after all expansions/etc
There is a shortage, they are short lived assets. It's a blip and unrelated to their long term profitability and valuation. They can't make a long lived business of building and renting out compute at those margins.
It was definitely a smart business move. It should be troubling to any shareholder than xAI is unable to utilize this infrastructure as renting it out to competitors.
T1 companies have longer depreciation cycles, they have customers that will use the dated hw for non-frontier work. They can make the capex more justifiable and have flexibility to be more creative about its use. A frontier lab really needs the best hw available at full capacity.
Respectfully, I tend to think of tier 1 data centers as someone I'm paying for colocation services and the value they provide is power infrastructure and redundancy, network infrastructure and redundancy, cooling, and physical security.
The shortage I referred to is in GPUs, that's what really being rented here.
Even if GPUs lasted forever, they're are a depreciating asset because they become obsolete with improvements over generations.
GPUs do not last forever, either. I've read here, and heard from others, that they aren't even living up to their 5 year depreciation schedules under production load, closer to 2-3 years.
I use AI all the time. I hope AI isn't short lived. It might be if they can't figure this shit out, or if IPOs like spacex poison public opinion against them first.
> GPUs do not last forever, either. I've read here, and heard from others, that they aren't even living up to their 5 year depreciation schedules under production load, closer to 2-3 years
People said this about GPUs during the crypto mining craze and were wrong back then too. While I can’t speak for the entire industry I can say my personal experience follows any normal intuition over solid state electronics.
Some early failures in the bathtub curve, and then you start seeing fans, heat paste, and board capacitors fail far before you start seeing any chip failures at scale.
Sure you can abuse anything you want to burn it out, but I doubt that’s what’s happening inside these facilities.
It's right in the article, there were 40bn of disclosed costs. It's still a good return, it pays for itself in 18 months, but if you build and rent data centres, then that's your business, and you're not likely to 100x in 3 years, which is the wild projection behind their valuation.
Also moves spend from capex to opex for your competitors - their access to your GPUs so don't have to wait to buy so many of their own, and I'm going to take a stab that those puppies are going to depreciate hard.
But better to make some money with it while trying to catch up than none money hoping you _can_ catch up.