Comment by lazide
19 days ago
Not necessarily if you count capital costs vs operating costs/margins.
Replacing cars every 3 years vs a couple % in efficiency is not an obvious trade off. Especially if you can do it in 5 years instead of 3.
19 days ago
Not necessarily if you count capital costs vs operating costs/margins.
Replacing cars every 3 years vs a couple % in efficiency is not an obvious trade off. Especially if you can do it in 5 years instead of 3.
You can sell the old, less efficient GPUs to folks who will be running them with markedly lower duty cycles (so, less emphasis on direct operational costs), e.g. for on-prem inference or even just typical workstation/consumer use. It ends up being a win-win trade.
Then you’re dealing with a lot of labor to do the switches (and arrange sales of used equipment), plus capital float costs while you do it.
It can make sense at a certain scale, but it’s a non trivial amount of cost and effort for potentially marginal returns.
Building a new data center and getting power takes years to double your capacity. Swapping out out a rack that is twice as fast takes very little time in comparison.
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You highlight the exact dilemma.
Company A has taxis that are 5 percent less efficient and for the reasons you stated doesn't want to upgrade.
Company B just bought new taxis, and they are undercutting company A by 5 percent while paying their drivers the same.
Company A is no longer competitive.
The debt company B took on to buy those new taxis means they're no longer competitive either if they undercut by 5%.
The scenario doesn't add up.
But Company A also took on debt for theirs, so that's a wash. You assume only one of them has debt to service?
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