I was looking into the new, probably AI, data center being built in town and noticed it’s built by a private equity backed firm. The data center was rejected by the city and has to operate with a standard cooperate building water supply. They said are switching to air cooling only and reducing the compute power to keep power usage the same. This has caused amazon, the alleged operator, to back out. So they are building a giant reduced capacity data center with no operator and apparently still think that’s a good idea. My understanding of the private equity bubble is that the firms can hide “under performing” assets because it’s all private. From what I read, possibly 3.2 Trillion dollars of it. I feel like this new data center is going on the “under performing” pile.
gpus as used for genai aren’t really suitable for normal loads like aerodynamic simulations, genai uses low precision data like fp8, fp4, blackwells and such are optimized for it so hard that you can’t really do anything else on this thing
They’re still somewhat functional for those workloads, and they can even use those low-precision components to emulate high-precision using libraries like cublas, though obviously not as fast as hardware that could do it natively.
It’s not like they can’t do it at all. It’s just that Hopper was better at FP64 than Blackwell is but if Blackwell chips become effectively free due to an AI crash then you could likely still use them in that capacity.
it’s hacky and wrong. or you could use different hardware, maybe from competition, because result isn’t worth electricity it used