Data Centers
This was a weird video:
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxUEOdC4VzU
The weirdest thing to me is that data centers are rated by the power they use in gigawatts ! Here is a snip from a EE Times story about an OpenAI and AMD deal:
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| Lisa Su of AMD and Sam Altman of OpenAI |
A gigawatt is 1,000,000,000 watts or 1000 megawatts (nuclear power plants like Point Beach in Wisconsin are a pair of 625 megawatt plants).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Beach_Nuclear_Plant
Maybe it's the QRPer in me, but why would anyone rate an AI Data Center by power rather than gigaflops or whatever the actual computing benchmarks are for AI, tokens ? what are those ? After viewing that video this Wisconsin data center seems sketchy to me:
https://constructionreviewonline.com/openai-oracle-and-vantage-to-build-15b-lighthouse-data-center-campus-in-wisconsin/
It reminds me of this:
https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/03/foxconn.html
They knocked down some houses, did a lot of land grading and built a crystal globe and that was about it - no Sharp televisions made in Wisconsin that I know of. In other words the data center boom may actually be placeholders just in case the wind changes and they actually need to build out some of this capacity. With Foxconn this never happened, 8K televisions never took off (and probably never will ?).
There is also the "singularity" when AI surpasses human intelligence - apparently raw, brute power is a prerequisite before the singularity can come to pass ? At least that is how it is being sold.
I remember during the pandemic some of the PIC chips I use became unobtainium. So I bought plug-in replacement PICs including a LOT of extras - a lot of those chips are still sitting here in my inventory, they may never be sold. Something similar may be happening with AI chips ?
Another video about AI hype:
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6OwIIDZuso
Finally this meme sorta sums things up (after all it is April 1st):
source: https://www.reddit.com/r/KoreaNewsfeed/comments/1qg6kpf/the_current_state_of_korean_economy
Samsung and SK/Hynix make memory for data centers so they are running full blast - the Dubai chocolate was the craze in South Korea over the winter.
Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm
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