Hacker News Reader

+ Rent, support staff, development costs, regulation and compliance, network, maintenance (cooling, fire suppression + lots more), marketing.

Speaking as someone who did sys admin for a small independent cloud provider, it definitely isn't virtually 100% of operating costs

View on HN

No offense intended to your personal experience, but I don't think "small independent cloud" is terribly important in the global analysis. This paper concludes that TDP and TCO have become the same thing, i.e. power is heat, power is opex.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/scaling/hardware/2021-jouppi.p...

One key call out re: power from that paper - "Most OpEx cost is for provisioning power and not for electricity use [2], so saving power already provisioned for doesn’t improve TCO as much as one might hope."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com