Spyxos
Gold Member
Demand for GPUs is unquestionably ramping up again as prices eclipse $70,000 per GPU in some China locales (that's for a data center H800 GPU), and leaders in the U.S. computing industry are taking to social media to complain that cloud-based GPU resources are fully booked and GPU hardware supplies are all reserved for the year ahead. Drastic times call for drastic measures, and we are beginning to see evidence that GPUs that should be heading to home desktop PC rigs are instead being snapped up by the AI industry players.
Naturally, gamers and enthusiasts will be worried about a repeat of the cryptomining craze, which decimated consumer GPU supplies: Are the crypto-bros of old destined to be replaced by the AI-bros — snapping up our precious gaming GPUs?
The first solid evidence of AI-focused businesses buying up consumer GPUs comes from a boast Tweeted by iconic IT hacker and entrepreneur George Hotz (AKA geohot).
Our calculations from the Hotz statement and image are that there are 60 GPUs in this "7.38 PFLOPS" batch (based on FP16 performance). Each of these RX 7900 XTX cards costs $979.99 on Amazon, at the time of writing. Thus, Hotz apparently just splashed out around $60,000 on this modest stack of GPU power.
Obviously this is a mere drop in the ocean, as the Comma AI founder and president says that there are "exaFLOPS more to come." For reference, one exaFLOPS is 1,000 petaFLOPS of performance. If we assume that Hotz aims to buy up to 7.38 exaFLOPS of GPU compute (1,000 x the first batch), he may have budgeted ~$60 million for this consumer graphics card buying spree. Or perhaps only ~$20 million, if he's only after around 2 exaFLOPS of AI compute.
www.tomshardware.com
Naturally, gamers and enthusiasts will be worried about a repeat of the cryptomining craze, which decimated consumer GPU supplies: Are the crypto-bros of old destined to be replaced by the AI-bros — snapping up our precious gaming GPUs?
The first solid evidence of AI-focused businesses buying up consumer GPUs comes from a boast Tweeted by iconic IT hacker and entrepreneur George Hotz (AKA geohot).
Our calculations from the Hotz statement and image are that there are 60 GPUs in this "7.38 PFLOPS" batch (based on FP16 performance). Each of these RX 7900 XTX cards costs $979.99 on Amazon, at the time of writing. Thus, Hotz apparently just splashed out around $60,000 on this modest stack of GPU power.
Obviously this is a mere drop in the ocean, as the Comma AI founder and president says that there are "exaFLOPS more to come." For reference, one exaFLOPS is 1,000 petaFLOPS of performance. If we assume that Hotz aims to buy up to 7.38 exaFLOPS of GPU compute (1,000 x the first batch), he may have budgeted ~$60 million for this consumer graphics card buying spree. Or perhaps only ~$20 million, if he's only after around 2 exaFLOPS of AI compute.
Evidence Shows AI-Driven Companies Are Buying up Gaming GPUs
Hopefully we can avoid a repeat of the cryptomining-GPU situation.
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