Author Stephen Witt described for The New Yorker the machines inside AI datacenters, the “new American factories,” as stacks of eighteen “shallow trays of computing equipment, each weighing around seventy pounds and holding four water-cooled G.P.U.s” that look like an oversize fridge and cost a few million dollars. The featured picture of the fridge is courtesy of NVIDIA, which last week became the first company valued over $5 trillion after revealing $500 billion in orders for those machines, per Ars Technica. NVIDIA showed it understands the political importance of the new data centers by hosting its annual AI conference in Washington D.C. instead of San Francisco, Politico explains. Attendees could put that in context with the four-minute video, “America, Land of Innovation” that kicked off the event. The rest of us noticed how important data centers already are when those of Amazon briefly stopped working mid-month, reported the Wall Street Journal. But never mind that, OpenAI still signed up to spend $38 billion using Amazon’s data centers to power ChatGPT, said The New York Times – one of its many deals adding up to $1.4 trillion in new factory orders.
Tags:Technology