As the Rock Man said: "...You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear..."
From The Register, March 26:
Why lease space that can't power or cool 120kW racks - or the next-gen 600kW monsters?
Comment Microsoft has walked away from negotiations to lease two gigawatts worth of datacenter capacity in the US and Europe, and has deferred and cancelled other datacenter leases, according to a new report from investment bank TD Cowen.
The bank’s analysts feel Microsoft’s lease cancellations were “largely driven by the decision to not support incremental Open AI training workloads.”
The report comes just over a month after the same analysts revealed Microsoft had terminated leases for several hundred megawatts of datacenter capacity in the US.
For some the cancellations are evidence that the AI boom is about to go bust.
However, we'd argue there's a far simpler explanation as to why Microsoft might be pulling back on its datacenter leases: many datacenters can't handle the power and cooling demands created by high-end AI hardware .
Nvidia's massive NVL72 rack-scale systems promise 30x or better performance for inference workloads, and four times better training performance compared to its Hopper GPUs. That performance comes at the expense of denser racks, higher power consumption and more waste heat production. Racks housing Nvidia’s latest are rated for 120kW of power, three times that of the typical Hopper rack. Liquid cooling is no longer an option but an inescapable requirement.
As TD Cowen notes, hyperscalers and cloud providers must redesign their datacenters to accommodate super-dense, power-guzzling devices – and doing so is far from simple....
....MUCH MORE
MSFT is down again today, off $0.58 (0.15%) to $389.39, after getting hit for $5.19 (-1.31%) on Wednesday.
NVDA down $1.05 (-0.92%) today follows yesterday's -$6.93 whackage.
