If Microsoft Can't Source Enough Electricity To Power All The Ai...

I worry about powering the sole GPU that's in my gaming rig, so that means I'm bonding with Microsoft, right?

To keep the AI juggernaut rolling ever forward, you might think that the biggest companies in artificial intelligence desperately need ridiculous numbers of AI GPUs. According to Microsoft, though, the issue isn't a compute or hardware limit, it's that there's not enough electrical power to run it all. And if that's the case, it raises the question as to how Amazon is going to cope now that it's signed a $38 billion, multi-year deal with OpenAI to give the company access to its servers.

It was Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, who made the point about insufficient power in a 70-minute interview (via Tom's Hardware) with YouTube channel Bg2 Pod, alongside OpenAI's boss, Sam Altman. It came about when the interview's host, Brad Gerstner, mentioned that Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang had said that there was almost zero chance of there being a 'compute glut' within the next couple of years (and by that, he means an excess of AI GPUs).

"The biggest issue we are now having is not a compute glut, but it’s power," replied Nadella. "It’s sort of the ability to get the builds done fast enough close to power. So, if you can’t do that, you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in. In fact, that is my problem today. It’s not a supply issue of chips; it’s actually the fact that I don’t have warm shells to plug into."

The warm shells that he refers to aren't tasty tacos; they're hubs already connected with the relevant power and other facilities required, ready to be loaded up with masses of AI servers from Nvidia. What Nadella is effectively saying is that getting hold of GPUs isn't the problem, it's accessing cheap enough electricity to run them all.

That's not necessarily just a case of there just not being sufficient power stations—it matters a great deal where they are, because while one can just dump a building down almost anywhere, if the local grid can't cope with the enormous power demands of tens of thousands of Nvidia Hopper and Blackwell GPUs, then there's no point in building the shell in the first place.

When I heard Microsoft's CEO make that comment, I immediately recalled another news story I'd read today: OpenAI's $38 billion deal with Amazon that will give it access to AWS's AI servers. OpenAI already has such an agreement with Microsoft to use its Azure services, with the latter pumping money into the former as

Source: PC Gamer