So each 2KW component is like a top-shelf space heater which the smart money never did want to run unless it was quite cold outside.

"GPUs per user" would be an interesting metric.

(Quick, inaccurate googling) says there will be "well over 1 million GPUs" by end of the year. With ~800 million users, that's 1 NVIDIA GPU per 800 people. If you estimate people are actively using ChatGPT 5% of the day (1.2 hours a day), you could say there's 1 GPU per 40 people in active use. Assuming consistent and even usage patterns.

That back of the envelope math isn't accurate, but interesting in the context of understanding just how much compute ChatGPT requires to operate.

Edit: I asked ChatGPT how many GPUs per user, and it spit out a bunch of calculations that estimates 1 GPU per ~3 concurrent users. Would love to see a more thorough/accurate break down.

It's easy to see what it could be by looking at Green500.

B200 is 1kW+ TDP ;)

It was announced last week that Nvidia acquired-hired a company that can connect more than 100,000 GPUs together as a cluster that can effectively serve as a single integrated system.

Bitcoin mining consumes about 25 GW: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci so this single deal amounts to about 40% of that.

To be clear, I am comparing power consumption only. In terms of mining power, all these GPUs could only mine a negligible fraction of what all specialized Bitcoin ASIC mine.

Edit: some math I did out of sheer curiosity: a modern top-of-the-line GPU would mine BTC at about 10 Ghash/s (I don't think anyone tried but I wrote GPU mining software back in the day, and that is my estimate). Nvidia is on track to sell 50 million GPUs in 2025. If they were all mining, their combined compute power would be 500 Phash/s, which is 0.05% of Bitcoin's global mining capacity.

I'm also wondering what kind of threat this could be to PoW blockchains.

I dunno.

Google is pretty useful.

It uses >15 TWh per year.

Theoretically, AI could be more useful than that.

Theoretically, in the future, it could be the same amount of useful (or much more) with substantially less power usage.

It could be a short-term crunch to pull-forward (slightly) AI advancements.

Additionally, I'm extremely skeptical they'll actually turn on this many chips using that much energy globally in a reasonable time-frame.

Saying that you're going to make that kind of investment is one thing. Actually getting the power for it is easier said than done.

VC "valuations" are already a joke. They're more like minimum valuations. If OpenAI is worth anywhere near it's current "valuations", Nvidia would be criminally negligent NOT to invest at a 90% discount (the marginal profit on their chips).

I mean if 10GW of GPUs gets us AGI and we cure cancer than that's cool, but I do get the feeling we're just getting uncannier chatbots and fully automated tiktok influencers

Do you think the existence of NYC and Chicago is insanely wasteful?