[jhallenworld]

>There are no dark GPUs

This might not be true. Someone was comparing Nvidia's production rate with known data center capacity, and they do not match. Their conclusion was that people (possibly even Nvidia) were hoarding GPUs- in the very short term this might be a good strategy, but GPUs go EOL fast. There are other stories about paused datacenter builds that match with this.

TSMC is definitely fully allocated, based on current 40 wk lead times for FPGAs..

[Dig1t]

All that means is that there's a bottleneck at the data center layer. When he says "dark GPUs" he's saying that there are no dark DEPLOYED GPUs.

This is a reference to the 1990's dot com bubble where internet infrastructure companies overbuilt network capacity, leading to the term "dark fiber". That was an indicator of a bubble because it showed that capacity was larger than demand. OP is saying that this is specifically NOT happening in the case of GPUs yet, indicating that demand still outstrips supply of compute.

>GPUs go EOL fast

We are seeing the opposite of what was expected, GPUs are actually getting more valuable because demand is so great, something that basically never happens. Even older chips have become more valuable.

>paused datacenter builds

It doesn't seem that datacenters have been paused because of lack of demand for AI, it seems mostly that there is a lot of pushback by cities to build these things and also there is a shortage of power to run them.

IMO none of these things point to a AI being a bubble (over-hyped, demand does not match the stated value). It mostly points to the opposite, there is massive demand for AI and every layer of the supply chain is struggling to keep up with that demand.

[hadlock]

Adding to this, a lot of fiber installed in the 1990s is still dark. Multi-wavelength XYZ and other improvements mean the same fiber from 35 years ago can carry 100 or 1000x what it was originally designed for. Also, like Solar, all the cost is in labor. When they designed the Seattle/King County fiber network, they knew they would never have access/permits to go back and add more, so instead of running a single 12 fiber bundle the size of your pinkie, they ran 3 x 1024 bundles the size of your arm through the hollow bridges that span I-5 freeway and snakes through Seattle underground. Almost all of that sits dark today despite being in a very busy area, simply because fiber technology keeps getting better.

[db48x]

Yea, fiber is great. They can do hundreds of terabits/s per fiber today, and petabits/s is not far away. Bandwidth is fundamentally cheap enough that my ISP offers 50Gbps residential service!

[podocarp]

Can I ask where do you stay? Korea? 50G is insane, is it on qsfp? Also what's the pricing on that?

[db48x]

I live in Oregon. The price was $900/month last time I checked. I believe they do provide a QSFP+ module to plug into your equipment. They also allow residential customers, at any tier of service, to announce their own IP blocks via BGP.

https://ziplyfiber.com/internet/multigig

[LearnYouALisp]

> ...GPUs are actually getting more valuable because demand is so great, something that basically never happens. Even older chips have become more valuable.

Huh, anybody want to buy a GTX 680? Or even a formerly-SLI'd pair?

[userbinator]

The retrocomputing community is driving up prices at that end of the market.

[snypher]

Don't you think that under excess demand, production will ramp, competition will become available etc? These posts read like we're all out of fresh silicon or something.

[elictronic]

Supply will catch up, it will just take 3-5 years, with the price rising the whole time. Basically a worse version of the Covid supply disruption where I sold my car for more than I bought it for years later.

The physical world can’t be patched overnight, and cutting edge manufacturing takes a long time. Fortunately we are in a very peaceful low tension world right now and no one would try burning down or blowing up one of those extremely important, irreplaceable fabs.

[aprdm]

No. Because the investment to get into the game is too big and takes too long. The ones who can create the silicon are already oversubscribed.

[dan00]

> IMO none of these things point to a AI being a bubble (over-hyped, demand does not match the stated value). It mostly points to the opposite, there is massive demand for AI and every layer of the supply chain is struggling to keep up with that demand.

Yes, the demand is there for the currently unsustainable price. Lets see what happens when the dumping of money into AI stops and the companies are forced to increase prices a lot.

[baq]

> IMO none of these things point to a AI being a bubble (over-hyped, demand does not match the stated value).

I agree the demand is there, but hyperscaler capex is what now? 3% GDP? This is an absurd amount of money and people who question whether the ROI is there have a point just because of the order of magnitude of this spend number.