Data Centers

GPUs used to have a simple business story: buy more, wire them well, train bigger models. That story is not false. It is just starting to resemble a children’s book. The adult version has buildings, regions, power constraints, optical links, oversubscribed networks, packet loss, pipeline bubbles, model chunks, microbatches, and a quiet question with a very expensive answer: when the GPUs no longer fit comfortably inside one data center building, how should the training job be split? ...

The economy did not become intelligent overnight Rent is a wonderfully clarifying word. When a company rents GPU capacity, it is not buying “AI magic.” It is paying for access to a physical production system: chips, servers, cooling, electricity, networking, land, software orchestration, and a pricing model that turns machine time into invoices. That invoice may look like a cloud bill. In national accounts, however, it becomes something more prosaic and more useful: consumption, investment, exports, government expenditure, or an intermediate input. ...