why would anyone sign such a contract?
If you want to switch back to on prem, there's probably a way to structure acquiring hardware so it doesn't break the contract. Maybe you lease it, maybe the purchase happens through a related company, maybe there was no way for the contracted cloud to find out...
It will be perfect for stuff like GPU-accelerated query engines, "classical ML" and every other CPU-based workload that could conceivably be offloaded to GPU
Is the idea that previously maintaining GPU programs was expensive whereas now AI makes it cheap? If so, I could buy that line of reasoning.
Maybe relatedly, I expect (hope) the hardware manufacturers will ramp up supply in the meanwhile which would also put downward pressure on GPUs. Right now though this hardware crunch is making me sad, not even because of GPUs but also because of general memory / disk.
Right, so they're not voluntary.
1. There is one supplier, so you have no choice. 2. Even if you had a choice to sign the contract, this still means that it's not the same as a trade-in, because trade-ins are always voluntary, but once you have signed the contract, a right of first refusal is not.
In general, the "you chose to sign the contract" argument is a poor justification for bad contracts. If the contract is bad, it is bad regardless of whether you chose to sign it.
Maybe someone could start a business buying up and rehousing these.
And precisely because it's such a huge headache to do yourself, I think a small company could make a nice business wrapping up used datacenter cards in that sort of server.
if you haven't heard a 5u server intended for a datacenter rack come to life it's quite the experience. Sounds like a plane taking off.
These things get hot and are fussy about their requirements.
In North America we are on 120V, making a standard 15A outlet only 1500W max, and something like 1200W sustained. To use higher wattage appliances, we have to upgrade our outlets to 20A (2000/1600W) or up our voltage to 240V, but that carries a different set of plugs and outlets as well.
It's 1800W for short periods and 1500W sustained.