Barbara Iverson
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biverson.bsky.social
Barbara Iverson
@biverson.bsky.social
1.4K followers 380 following 520 posts
Professor Emerita Digital Journalism - Columbia College Chicago. Emerta Director at Voqal. Org. Interests: Democracy, biking, swimming, painting, progressive politics. Like Persephone, I split my time between Chicago and Florida.
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Reposted by Barbara Iverson
The Google bot is onboard.
November 26, 2025 at 2:26 AM
Reposted by Barbara Iverson
edzitron.com
NVIDIA's story is insane. Data centers take years to build, cost hundreds of millions of dollars in construction, labor and permitting, and require massive amounts of power, and *to this day* we still lack a complete understanding of what they cost to run.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...
Let Me Explain To You How Expensive And Arduous It Is To Actually Build A Data Center, And Remind You That Every Single Time Anybody Buys NVIDIA GPUs They're Probably Dealing With This So, let me give you a theoretical example. I swear I'm going somewhere with this.You, a genius, have decided you are about to join the vaunted ranks of "AI data center ownership." You decide to build a "small" AI data center — 25MW (megawatts, which in this example, refers to the combined power draw of the tech inside the data center). That can't be that much, right? OpenAI is building a 1.2GW one out in Abilene Texas. How much could this tiny little thing cost? Sidenote: It’s a minor thing, but I want to clarify something. I said “in this example” in the previous paragraph because when we talk about the power capacity of a data center, we could be referring to one of two things. The first is the power draw of the servers in the facility — which is called the IT Load — or the total amount of power that can be provided to that facility. Here’s where it gets tricky. A facility that can draw, say, 25MW of power from the grid can’t just use all of that in one go. You need a reserve for what’s known as the “design day,” which is the hottest day of the year, when the facility’s cooling systems are under the most strain, and when power transmission losses are at their highest. That reserve is, from what I’ve been told, around 30% of the total available electricity. Cooling systems are power-hungry! Who knew? Me. I did. I’ve been telling you for over a year. Okay, well, let's start with those racks. You're gonna need to give Jensen Huang $600 million right away, as you need 200 GB200 racks. You're also gonna need a way to make them network together, because otherwise they aren't going to be able to handle all those big IT loads, so that's gonna be another $80 million or more, and you're going to need storage and servers to sync all of this up, which is, let's say, another $35 million. So… Anyway, sadly data centers require something called a "building." Construction costs for a data center are somewhere from $8 million to $12 million per megawatt, so, crap, okay. That's $250 million, but probably more like $300 million. We're now up to $1.02 billion, and we haven't even got the power yet. Okay, sick. Do you have one billion dollars? You don't? No worries! Private credit — money loaned by non-banking entities — has been feeding more than $50 billion dollars a quarter into the hungry mouths of anybody who desires to build a data center. You need $1.02 billion. You get $1.5 billion, because, you know, "stuff happens." Don't worry about those pesky high interest rates — you're about to be printing big money, AI style! Now you're done raising all that cash, it'll now only take anywhere from 6 to 18 months for site selection, permitting, design, development, construction, and energy procurement. You're also going to need about 20 acres of land for that 100,000 square foot data center. You may wonder why 100,000 square feet needs that much space, and that's because all of the power and cooling equipment takes up an astonishing amount of room. So, yeah, after two years and over a billion dollars, you too can own a data center with NVIDIA GPUs that turn on, and at that point, you will offer a service that is functionally identical to everybody else buying GPUs from NVIDIA. Your competitors are Amazon, Google and Microsoft, followed by neoclouds — AI chip companies selling the same thing as you, except they're directly backed by NVIDIA, and frequently, the big hyperscaler companies with brands that most people have heard of, like AWS and Azure. Oh, also, this stuff costs an indeterminately-large amount of money to run. You may wonder why I can't tell you how much, and that's because nobody wants to actually discuss the cost of running GPUs, the thing that underpins our entire stock market. There're good reasons, too. One does not just run "a GPU" — it's …
November 24, 2025 at 5:04 PM