Comment by tristanj
7 hours ago
If you've already paid for and reserved a whole cluster of GPUs, any idle capacity is capacity you've already paid for. Using it is effectively free. So might as well use it to solve fun math puzzles.
Though, it would make more financial sense to mine crypto.
Only if you pay a flat rate for electricity and cooling.
But Anthropic isn't paying for the electricity and cooling. They don't run their own data centers, they rent compute from providers who cover those costs.
That's entirely why they can blow compute on the fun projects like this. If they had to pay extra for the electricity, they wouldn't do it.
But training LLM's is also a task one can do whenever you have a spare GPU-minutes.
I wonder why they don't have some kind of scheduler which makes sure there are never any idle minutes. One would imagine they at least would have autoscaling on their production serving workload and use the freed compute capacity for model training for example.
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Is the electricity cost far greater than the marketing value?
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Most of the GPU cost is in the GPUs themselves (and in the space and maintenance costs of the building). Electricity is a small fraction, and it's not like datacenters are just going to shut down their servers when they're not in use.
There is cost, but the cost is mostly the opportunity cost of not being able to do something else.
> Electricity is a small fraction, and it's not like datacenters are just going to shut down their servers when they're not in use.
I don't have any insight on modern GPU datacenters, but in decades past, some owned and operated datacenters didn put effort into making sure power management worked because the cost savings were worth it. I'm pretty sure I saw plans to shed load and power off servers if a utility made a demand response request or in case of loss of cooling. I wouldn't be surprised if some owned and operated data centers do regular full shutdowns at off peak... WOL, IPMI or RTC wakeup can bring them back when needed and if you already have a dynamic service orchestrator and setup times are acceptable, why not shut down if there's no actual priority work and there's also no idle priority opportunistic load either...
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> it would make more financial sense to mine crypto
GPUs are power-inefficient for mining most crypto so not necessarily. You may end up paying more in electricity than you are able to mine.
Most crypto mining is on ASICs now.
You missed the part where they have already pre-paid for the GPU-hours and they pay the same regardless of he electricity used.
Also, even if they were paying for electricity, they would lose less money mining crypto than factoring RSA numbers.
Except for the prize money for the RSA challenge contest! Although they'll also need to have Claude invent a time machine.
How much crypto do you think the mentioned 30 GPU years would have produced at current exchange rates? They're not as efficient as ASICs but GPU's can still mine a lot...
wouldn't even cover the cost of power and cooling otherwise everyone would still be doin it