Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

Considering Nvidia's hard shift to crypto and now AI, I doubt videogames are even in the same ballpark.

How many DCs are devoted solely to gaming?

Considering many games make use of cloud computing for online play and similar functions, they probably make up a pretty goot bit of global cloud compute capacity. Likely quite a lot less than the big AI players, but not an insignificant amount.

The energy costs of the cloud computing required for gaming are substantially less in power - not to mention overall demand - than LLMs. Come on, we're not in the same energy ballpark here.

>The energy costs of the cloud computing required for gaming are substantially less in power

Yes but it adds up when you consider that just on Steam alone there are 200 million monthly active users.

Steam games can run on less than 4GB of RAM, and per person are likely played only an hour or so a day. AI hyper scalars use far more to serve a single customer.

You're not including the physical supply chain energy consumption of distributing video game equipment in this analysis. Nobody ships LLMs to big box stores and tries to sell them to consumers.

Historically all those boxes and discs were significant, at least if you sum them all for all time.

Today physical discs are rapidly becoming a niche that newer consoles just won't have. PC games are almost never sold physically anymore.

>How many DCs are devoted solely to gaming?

An entire planet. Just Steam alone has one or two hundres million monthly active users.

The whole planet's DCs are not solely serving games. Apparently games take about 300 TWh whilst AI is around 500 TWh.

All of gaming is in the 300B USD range while just the CapEx of hyper scalars is already over 200B.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com