this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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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