Most people reading this are probably very familiar with buying things between $0-1000 USD (such as everyday food and everyday clothing, perhaps weekly rent). Some of us will have experience buying more expensive items, like a car ($10,000s), or maybe even a house ($100,000s or even $1,000,000s). Some of you might want to object to those numbers I listed, they obviously will vary wildly in different markets, but I want to now ask about much more expensive things.
What is the cost of some items that few-if-any Lemmy users can afford? What can the absurdly rich buy that we can’t? How much does it cost them?
You must give a money value with some evidence, no just knee-jerking and saying something vague like “elections” - instead find articles disclosing how much manipulation campaigns cost a political party.
Data centers cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Now imagine building a data center for some stupid fad tech, then when you’re done and ready to bring it up, everyone has moved on from the fad.
Oh and that figure doesn’t include the actual servers themselves. Considering my two production quality rack mount servers were about $5,000 each, if you put 20,000 of those in your data center (a very small amount, but the kind of servers in the same data center vary wildly, so I’m thinking a fleet of these would be only part of the data center), that’d be another $100,000,000.
Now, price Nvidia H200s. (Spoiler: about $35K)
Oh boy. Yeah, adding graphics/AI stuff is a whole different ballpark of expensive.
That’s definitely on the low end, at my employer we spend around 20k per server, that’s for 256 cores, 2tb of ram and some nvme.
Yeah, I didn’t need a lot of RAM, which is why they were relatively cheap. They’re compute heavy, with 128 cores, 256GB RAM, and 4TB NVMe. Compute heavy is a relatively common use case for servers though.