I just added up how much it would cost (in theory—assuming everything is in-stock and ready to ship) to build out a data center capable of training something like qwen3.5:122b from scratch in a few months: $66M. That’s how much it would cost for 128 Nvidia B200 nodes (they have 8 GPUs each), infiniband networking, all-flash storage (SSDs), and 20 racks (the hardware).
If OpenAI went bankrupt, that would result in a glut of such hardware which would flood the market, so the cost would probably drop by 40-60%.
Right now, hardware like that is all being bought up and monopolized by Big AI. This has resulted in prices going up for all these things. In a normal market, it would not cost this much! Furthermore, the reason why Big AI is spending sooooo much fucking money on data centers is because they’re imagining demand. It’s not for training. Not anymore. They’re assuming they’re going to reach AGI any day now and when they do, they’ll need all that hardware to be the world’s “virtual employee” provider.
BTW: Anthropic has a different problem than the others with AGI dreams… Claude (for coding) is in such high demand that their biggest cost is inference. They can’t build out hardware fast enough to meet the demand (inference, specifically). For every dollar they make, they’re spending a dollar to build out infrastructure. Presumably—some day—they’ll actually be able to meet demand with what they’ve got and on that day they’ll basically be printing money. Assuming they can outrun their debts, of course.
Bullshit
I just added up how much it would cost (in theory—assuming everything is in-stock and ready to ship) to build out a data center capable of training something like qwen3.5:122b from scratch in a few months: $66M. That’s how much it would cost for 128 Nvidia B200 nodes (they have 8 GPUs each), infiniband networking, all-flash storage (SSDs), and 20 racks (the hardware).
If OpenAI went bankrupt, that would result in a glut of such hardware which would flood the market, so the cost would probably drop by 40-60%.
Right now, hardware like that is all being bought up and monopolized by Big AI. This has resulted in prices going up for all these things. In a normal market, it would not cost this much! Furthermore, the reason why Big AI is spending sooooo much fucking money on data centers is because they’re imagining demand. It’s not for training. Not anymore. They’re assuming they’re going to reach AGI any day now and when they do, they’ll need all that hardware to be the world’s “virtual employee” provider.
BTW: Anthropic has a different problem than the others with AGI dreams… Claude (for coding) is in such high demand that their biggest cost is inference. They can’t build out hardware fast enough to meet the demand (inference, specifically). For every dollar they make, they’re spending a dollar to build out infrastructure. Presumably—some day—they’ll actually be able to meet demand with what they’ve got and on that day they’ll basically be printing money. Assuming they can outrun their debts, of course.