I’m even more confused by the economics of the frontier model businesses. Even if they got preferential prices, they are still paying an inordinate amount for their infrastructure.
If it wasn’t economically feasible without VC/Nvidia money 3 years ago, how is it possibly economically feasible now at 10x prices for things like memory?
There is a reason NVIDIA and the hyperscalers are injecting so much money into them
It's pulling the ladder up behind them. OpenAI bought up more co tracts for wafers than they could even use. But now that means everyone else has to fight over what's left. This makes it too expensive to compete with OpenAI. No upstart can really afford to build infrastructure.
OpenAI (Stargate) kicked off the price increases a year ago by locking up 40% of the global supply of RAM output.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...