The immediate catalyst, it seems, is an intensifying focus on capex, or capital expenditures. Microsoft revealed that its spending surged 66% to $37.5 billion in the latest quarter, even as growth in its Azure cloud business cooled slightly. Even more concerning to analysts, however, was a new disclosure that approximately 45% of the company’s $625 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO)—a key measure of future cloud contracts—is tied directly to OpenAI, the company revealed after reporting earnings Wednesday afternoon. (Microsoft is both a major investor in and a provider of cloud-computing services to OpenAI.)

    • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      Pretty sure MS will just seize the OpenAi data centers and repurpose them for Azure and rent out compute time or use it for XBox streaming. Non of the hardware will reach the open market.

      • Ajen@sh.itjust.works
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        4 hours ago

        Regardless of who owns it or what they do with it, those GPUs will get sold on the used market with plenty of life left. Older AI GPUs, networking equipment (eg 100GbE), SAS drives, etc have been easy to find on eBay and other sites for a long time, because data centers replace hardware long before it’s expected to fail.

        • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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          4 hours ago

          Exactly. They have like an 8 year depreciation, but they supposedly become obsolete in a couple of years for whatever cutting edge AI is supposed to be.