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Comment by tosh | Hacker News Reader

Is there any data on whether Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI etc are most cost efficient in getting datacenter compute online and operating it?

I'd be interested in how large the range is here across company and region and specific data center and how it relates to companies like Hetzner if at all.

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Well, Elon seems to take the fastest path possible to these DCs. One can envision a future where these get shut down for the severity of the pollution, not to mention being built and operated illegally [0].

[0] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...

Which is precisely why there has been a push to weaken the EPA and other regulating agencies

> Is there any data on whether Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI etc are most cost efficient in getting datacenter compute online and operating it?

Well considering that ~80% of the price is hardware deprecation, I don't know why they'd be considerably worse than anyone else at negotiating hardware deals.

Typically when you buy in bulk, you have more sway.

Companies like Google also have in-house chips like TPUs that are substantially cheaper for inference for them to make than anyone else can get through Nvidia.

I’ve seen some numbers related to datacenters in Ireland and they would stress price per MW as a way to see where to build them. But then you have depreciation of equipment as well. Depreciation can be played with when filing taxes though.

Amazon / AWS is very efficient at it. They are the largest cloud by a significant margin. Much larger than Hetzner.

Google and MS may be close behind.

Not sure about Meta but they are also renting from Amazon so...

Anthropic mostly rents from Amazon, Goog & MS.

I don't think they are most efficient for small GPUs. I think they might only be the one which have capex and certainty required for multimillion dollar purchase of GB200 NVL72 or something of that scale.

that's asking the cart before the horse; is there any data on what compute actually results in real GDP improvements?

Nothing other than vendor promises and white papers.

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