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Comment by CalChris | Hacker News Reader

That is a good question. My first intuition was yes. But Google has about 2.5M servers at say $2000 per. That's $5B which is chump change for the NSA.

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I’d be very surprised if that were even close to the average cost of a cloud datacenter server. Wouldn’t they be optimized for physical density and power efficiency (which is to say, maxed out CPU/RAM)?

Interested to know more about this. I don’t think much public information is out there, but a quick Google revealed Snap signed a five year $2B contract with G back in 2017, and that’s just one major customer.

if those were equipment dedicated to brute-forcing I would expect it to be ASICs/FPGAs rather than typical servers. You'd get orders of magnitude faster solution[0]. At the expense of flexibility of course since those chips would be single purpose.

[0] For a very simple example compare the hashrate on any CPU vs a bitcoin miner ASIC with a comparable size.

The thing is that not all servers in datacenters are maxed out to 100% usage all the time. A low priority process using idle resources could be used allowing for huge total cpu-power (given the scale of goog/fb/amzn datacenters) at no additional cost while if an agency wants $5B worth datacenter an agency must buy a $5B datacenter.

On the other hand those idle resources could be rented to an agency at a discount price

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