AI companies are continuing to pour ungodly amounts of money into building out data centers, in an enormous bet that both analysts and tech leaders warn may not pay off for many years to come — if it ever does.
OpenAI most recently committed to spending well over a trillion dollars before the end of the decade as it continues to burn oodles of cash each quarter, enormous losses that are having investors asking some hard questions.
Put simply, as IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told The Verge‘s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel during a recent episode of the “Decoder” podcast, the math isn’t adding up.
When asked whether he thinks “there’s an enterprise [return on investment] that would justify the spend” on trying to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) — OpenAI’s ill-defined priority number one — Krishna laid out some back-of-the-envelope math.
“It takes about $80 billion to fill up a one-gigawatt data center,” he said. “That’s today’s number. If one company is going to commit 20-30 gigawatts, that’s $1.5 trillion of [capital expenditure].”
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