Found out OpenAI spent $5 billion last year on compute alone

I was reading through some earnings breakdown on a tech site and that number just stopped me cold. Five billion dollars for just the computer time to run their models. That's more than most small countries spend on their entire military. It made me wonder how long this AI boom can actually sustain itself if the costs keep climbing like that. Has anyone seen a breakdown of where all that compute budget actually goes?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_derek27d ago

Five billion dollars just to keep the lights on and the GPUs running, lol. I wonder how many of those chips are just sitting idle while they fine tune the latest cat meme generator or whatever. Bet a huge chunk of that budget goes to cooling too, those data centers use enough electricity to power a small country. Maybe they should just buy some giant fans from Amazon and call it a day.

the_susan27d ago

Ever tried standing a server rack in front of a window AC unit? Works surprisingly well lol.