On the contrary, data centers continue to pop up deploying thousands of GPUs specifically because the numbers work out.
The H100 launched at $30k GPU and rented for $2.50/hr. It's been 3 years since launch, the rent price is still around $2.50.
During these 3 years, it has brought in $65k in revenue.
We will see how the maths works out given there is 19 GW shortage of power. 7 year lead time for Siemens power turbines, 3-5 years for transformers.
Raw commodities are shooting up, not enough education to cover nuclear and SMEs and the RoI is already underwater.
Reports in North Virginia and Texas are stating existing data centres are being capped 30% to prevent residential brownouts.
That's good for now, but considering the federal push to prevent states from creating AI regulations, and the overall technological oligopoly we have going on, I wonder if, in the near future, their energy requirements might get prioritized. Again, cynical. Possibly making up scenarios. I'm just concerned when more and more centers pop up in communities with less protections.
I think building and operating data center infrastructure is a high risk, low margin business.
The scale there is a little bit different. If you're training an LLM with 10,000 tightly-coupled GPUs where one failure could kill the entire job, then your mean time to failure drops by that factor of 10,000. What is a trivial risk in a single-GPU home setup would become a daily occurrence at that scale.