this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
1245 points (98.7% liked)
Fuck AI
7191 readers
2289 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That and most of the cost of the data centers revolve around the servers and support for those servers ie. Cooling, power racks ect. I've heard it can be cheaper to build a whole new building than bringing one, even currently operating one, up to new specs.
This is also extremely true!
Those AI servers are probably a discounted cost of around 3-5k per U (I'm probably low in this estimate but I have a really hard time believing they're actually paying $20k+ per GPU), probably about 40U per rack is actually loaded with servers, so if we round the footprint of a server rack to 4 square feet (because I don't feel like actually calculating it out right now) that's about $30,000-50,000 per square foot.
I have a hard time imagining any kind of structure costing anywhere near 1 order of magnitude less than the cost per square foot of the servers
They're arranging 72 Blackwell GPUs into each server rack, at around a price of $3 million, in a cabinet that is 2236mm x 600 mm x 1068mm. That's approximately a 7 square foot footprint, so about $430,000 per square foot of server. There's obviously a need for spacing between servers, but you're basically underestimating by an order of magnitude.
Yeah my assumption is that the actual price paid for compute is a lot lower than what Nvidia puts in their press releases. It's like Dell telling you your bog stand R760 will cost $30k on their website then you talk a rep and they mark it down to 5-10k in the first round of negotiations and if you buy enough of them they'll knock a couple thousand more off the price.
I did however forget to factor in the cost of the server, but they're so often just Supermicro white boxes in these datacenters and I'm just throwing out vague numbers based purely on my knowledge of roughly what things generally cost normally
I feel connectivity and efficiency was the aim initially rather than speed