And a pile of GPUs doesn't really do much good without servers, racks, networking, power, cooling, and a building to house it all in.

And a pile of "servers, racks, networking, power, cooling, and a building to house it all in" doesn't cost 10-20x more than the GPUs.

If that were the case, Cooler Master would be the trillion dollar company, lmao.

If Cooler Master could charge enterprise computing prices for their consumer level gear, they probably would be.

Something like an H100 is definitely a feat of engineering, though.

Nothing prevents Cooler Master from releasing a line of GPUs equally performant and, while at it, even cheaper. But when we measure reality, after the wave function of fentanyl and good intentions collapses ... oh yeah, turns out only nVidia is making those chips, whoops ...

Looking around a bit the price was ~70k$USD _in China_ around the time they where released in 2023, cheaper bulk sells where a thing, too.

Note that this are the China prices with high markup due to export controls etc.

The price of a H800 80GiB in the US is today more like ~32k$USD .

But for using H800 clusters well you also need as fast as possible interconnects, enough motherboards, enough fast storage, cooling, building, interruption free power etc. So the cost of building a "H800" focused Datacenter is much much higher then multiplying GPU cost by number.

Still $400m seem unlikely.

I find reports of these GPUs costing $70k each 6 quarters ago [0]. So, maybe not $400m, but a $100m+ number seems about right.

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/price-of-nvidia-compute-gp...

You can’t buy the gpus individually, and even if you can on a secondary market, you can’t use them without the baseboard, and you can’t use the baseboard without a compatible chassis, and a compatible chassis is full of CPUs, system memory etc. on top of that, you need a fabric. Even if you cheap out and go RoCE over IB it’s still 400gbs hcas, optics and switches

Yea, a node in a cluster costs as much as an American house. Maybe not on its own, but to make it useful for large scale training, even under the new math of deepseek, it costs as much as a house.

See https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/05/01/just-how-big-are-nvi...

They estimated $200k for a single NVIDIA GPU-based CPU complete with RAM and networking. That's where my number came from. (RAM and especially very-high-speed networking is very expensive at these scales.)

You mean this part?

"Add it all up, and the average selling price of an Nvidia GPU accelerated system, no matter where it came from, was just under $180,000, the average server SXM-style, NVLink-capable GPU sold for just over $19,000 (assuming the GPUs represented around 85 percent of the cost of the machine)"

That implies they assumed an 8-GPU system. (8 × $19,000 = $152,000 ≈ 85% × $180,000)

yes