I think these pledges offload some of the risk onto Amazon/Oracle/etc

If Anthropic/OpenAI miss projections, infra providers can somewhat likely still turn around and sell it to the next guy or use it themselves. If they have more demand than expected (as Anthropic currently does), vcs will throw money at them and they can outbid the competition

If they built it themselves and missed projections it's a much more expensive mistake

It's just risk sharing. Infra providers take some of the risk and some of the upside

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throwup238 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> If they built it themselves and missed projections it's a much more expensive mistake

Not if their pricing comes with multiyear commitments for reserved pricing. No doubt they get a huge volume discount but the advertised AWS reserved pricing is already enough for pay for a whole 8x HX00 pod plus the NVIDIA enterprise license plus the staff to manage it after only a one year commitment. On-demand pricing is significantly more expensive so they’re going to be boxed in by errors in capacity planning anyway (as has been happening the last few months).

The economics here are absurd unless you’re involved in a giant circular investment scheme to pump up valuations.

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dweekly 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The pricing models that are published on AWS' website almost certainly have almost nothing to do with the pricing models that are discussed behind closed doors for a $100 billion commitment.

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throwup238 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Of course not, but unless they’re getting the sweet heart deal of a lifetime from Amazon of all places, it’s still a hogwash. We’re talking about enough capital to build their own fab and a dozen datacenters*. This deal isn’t going to be buying existing capacity because that’s already stretched, it will be paying for new buildouts.

Afterwards Amazon will be milking the machines these commitments buy for nearly a decade. That tradeoff makes sense at a small scale (even up to $X00 million or even billions), but at $Y0 or $Z00 billion?

Color me skeptical. There are plenty of other side benefits like upgrading to the newest GPUs every few years, but again we’re talking about paying for new buildouts with upfront commitments anyway.

* obviously the timelines, scientific risk, and opportunity cost make this completely infeasible but that’s the scale we’re talking about. It’s a major industrial project on the scale of the thirty year space shuttle program (~$200 billion).

	▲	coredog64 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You can get a significant AWS discount with an annual spend starting around $1M/year.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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