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days of future past (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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[–] 15 points 3 months ago (10 children)

When the internet dot com boom happened telecom infrastructure providers were putting more lines into the ground than there was demand for it since they predicted that growth would accelerate. But then the bubble burst and the overcapacity was not used for years aka dark fiber. But then growth picked up again and since there were already lines in the ground the growth on demand wasn’t putting pressure on supply and thus companies could buy bandwidth very cheaply. This will probably happen with all these datacenters when the bubble bursts. The big tech companies will retreat, scale down investments and leave these datacenters underutilized. Either they will sell their assets or rent it out cheaply and thus startups and smaller companies can use the overcapacity at a low cost.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    The difference between dark fiber and datacenters is that datacenters need a company with enough revenue to maintain the structure. Most data centers are built like big box stores: super cheaply and not meant to last more than a couple of decades while in active use for their intended purpose. You know that Shopko or K-mart that shut down 5 years ago and is still empty? You see how quickly that building has started falling apart with no company large enough to own the space and maintain it? That's what empty datacenters are going to be like.

    Fiber on the other hand is just strands of glass with some material covering it to prevent light leaks and provide strength. As long as that glass is unbroken there is zero maintenance required whether the fiber is in use or not. Fiber also has theoretically infinite bandwidth (they're currently working towards releasing 1.2 terrabit transceivers) and usually when fiber is run they run a big fat cable with dozens of not hundreds of strands of fiber so there's dozens if not hundreds of times the amount of bandwidth of a single pair of strands (and lots of spare strands should a few be broken). Sure old fiber won't be made with the tight tolerances that we have for fiber made today, so you might only get a few gigabit out of a single pair, but that's still a ton of basically free bandwidth just sitting there as dark fiber that you can use to get off the ground then start running your own once you have some cashflow

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    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),

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    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

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago

    Fiber is a super special case as just about the only infrastructure material that can sit in the ground for 20 years unmaintained, and then get connected to state of the art endpoints and work at modern standards.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Interesting. Let me try one.

    Step 1, atomic bomb is very powerful
    Step 2, everyone rushes to build atomic bombs
    Step 3, ???
    Step 4, everyone can use cheap nuclear power

    The difference between dot-com boom and AI boom is that dot-com caused massive hiring at the beginning at ridiculous salaries, and dropped back to normal demand. It didn't cause massive layoffs and force remaining workers to overwork.

    Both managements are stupid. The dot-com management only lost their own money, but AI management made people leave their own country penniless in the worst case.

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