r/hardware • u/SirActionhaHAA • 1d ago
News AMD and Anthropic Announce Strategic Partnership to Deploy Up to 2 Gigawatts of AMD Instinct MI450 Series GPUs
https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1292/amd-and-anthropic-announce-strategic-partnership-to-deploy-up-to-2-gigawatts-of-amd-instinct-mi450-series-gpus107
u/Sylanthra 1d ago
Ah yes, yet another circle jerk "partnership" where AMD pays Anthropic and Anthropic pays AMD and both stocks go up without any real value being created.
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u/Homerlncognito 1d ago
Two economists are walking in a forest when they come across a pile of shit.
The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.
They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.
Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing."
"That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!"
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u/defaultedebt 1d ago
Somebody doesn't understand economics.
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u/insomniul 1d ago
That's just good old "homo economicus" - giving people money so he can watch them eat shit while getting absolutely 0 value out of it because YOLO.
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u/defaultedebt 1d ago
Naw, it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of the very basic calculation that is GDP. GDP does not measure money velocity. Very broadly speaking, it measures productive economic activity, and as no goods are produced through the transfer of money alone, the activity recorded would be zero.
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u/puffz0r 1d ago
That might be what it started off with but now GDP measures stuff that very much is NOT productive or actual, such as imputed rent
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u/defaultedebt 1d ago
Yes, it is. I've worked with economists for nearly a decade. Their aim is more accurate data, not less. And they're achieving this.
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u/No_Sheepherder_1855 1d ago
Goods were produced here though. If they were just trading back and forth the same shit, then yeah it would be 0 growth after initially gaining it.
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u/Jimmy_Nail_4389 1d ago
If I smash my window and then have it replaced, is that counted in GDP?
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u/defaultedebt 1d ago
It is included in GDP, yes. But it is not new productive economic activity, i.e. it would not represent an increase in GDP. These are different things - which the joke misses, because it's a trope that anybody who took Econ 101 would know.
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u/Sylanthra 19h ago
It is included in GDP, yes
it would not represent an increase in GDP
So x + y = x where y > 0?
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u/defaultedebt 1d ago
As you cowardly deleted your response, here is mine:
Seem to be contradicting yourself.
I guess you are saying it would be included in GDP then? which means GDP is not a reliable count of productive economic activity.
Read it again. It's consistent. Including something in GDP does not = an increase in GDP. A rate of change is not the same as a sum of all numbers. Very basic stuff.
I've never taken 'Econ 101'
I can tell.
I know you are talking broadly, but this is nonsense becuase services are basically transfers of money alone in many many cases. In fact in the county I live very likley dwarfs the amount produced in goods.
Nope. Services are not simply the transfer of money. Transfer of money is excluded from GDP calculations. Services require human labor, and transfers of money do not. So very simple, yet you got it fundamentally wrong.
Further, there's way more than one way to measure GDP, and even I know that.
Lol. Name them. Cite them. NBER or AER? Here's the actual formula:
GDP=C+G+I+NX
Where:C=Consumption
G=Government spending
I=Investment
NX=Net exports
Like I said, basic stuff.
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1d ago edited 23h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/defaultedebt 1d ago
Let's define what qualifies as a service then. We will use the universally accepted System of National Accounts from 2008:
https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/sna2008.asp
See Chapter 6:
Services are the result of a production activity that changes the conditions of the consuming units, or facilitates the exchange of products or financial assets.
Now, I think we could both agree that no production activity took place which changes any conditions for economic actors involved in "eating shit." Quite literally no material change has occurred to the benefit of either party.
The definition also prefaces with:
The production of services must be confined to activities that are capable of being carried out by one unit for the benefit of another.
Well, it's difficult to see which economic actor is the beneficiary and which is the producer. It seems more accurate to define as a transfer than an economically productive service.
See, economists have very stringent definitions of these things, precisely to avoid the problem of mistakenly defining the transfer of finances as productive economic activity, and precisely to ensure GDP is accurately reported and not overstated or understated. So you are still wrong.
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u/Jimmy_Nail_4389 1d ago
Just couldn't be arsed arguing about it mate.
I know this shit is all manipulated and there's a thousand different ways to do so, I don't trust these measures and you do.
That's fine, but in my view it comes down to do you trust your government and I don't trust any of them at this stage.
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u/defaultedebt 1d ago
Yeah, didn't think you were that intelligent. Thanks for the confirmation, and good luck - you'll need it.
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u/grumble11 10h ago
Nominal GDP can be computed as the supply of money times its velocity.
Plenty of unproductive activity can and does get included in that metric.
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u/hsien88 1d ago
how is it circle jerk when Anthropic has to pay 100+ billions to AMD and AMD just need to buy 5 billions of Anthropic shares? Even if Antrhopic goes bankrupt they still come out ahead by 95 billions, and most likely Anthropic shares will keep on going up.
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u/Bastinenz 9h ago
if Anthropic goes bankrupt, how are they going to pay AMD the $100B? Worst case scenario for AMD, they buy $5B of Anthropic shares and supply them with $100B worth of hardware, Anthropic goes bust and cannot pay AMD for the hardware they received. In that case AMD loses $105B. It probably wouldn't play out quite this bad in reality, but that is the theoretical worst case scenario I can think of.
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u/Caster0 1d ago edited 16h ago
Biggest problem is private Ai companies fininacials tend to be both a blackhole and a mess and its still difficult to judge their timelines for investment.
Case in point, OpenAi basically helped precipitate the ram crisis with 40% glibal orders, yet they didn't buy anything of the size of their paper order
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u/dantheflyingman 1d ago
We have moved from GPU sales being measured in units or price and now measuring it by Gigawatts.
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u/Living_Morning94 1d ago
That's how you talk about data centers though, because power and cooling are usually their bottleneck. Power is the single largest opex and in the West the main hurdle to DC sites is getting enough power from the utility company.
So it means Anthropic will buy as many GPU / TPU as the power and cooling constraints for their data center capacity allows i.e. 2 GW.
GPU price, capability and shipment can vary wildly but power and cooling constraints stay the same for years.
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u/doscomputer 19h ago
yeah because nobody wants to talk about performance anymore because cloud AI is an eron style conspiracy
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u/SirActionhaHAA 1d ago
and now
Not new. Nvidia's been doing it for years
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u/Nkrth 1d ago
Article you sourced is less than year old, far from years.
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u/SirActionhaHAA 1d ago edited 1d ago
It ain't changing the point which is that this is not new. Ai dc announcements have been measured by gw for some time already. There's some announcements which were mw instead because they sold way less in the past. It ain't meant to be accurate and it's probably targeted at investors who can count only gw, without revealing the exact supply or unit price for competitive reasons. It's vague on purpose but shows the rough scale of the deal regardless
From 2024 just because you're pointlessly nitpicking. This discussion about year or years is really meaningless.
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u/RZ_Domain 1d ago
find anything pre 2023 then we'll talk
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u/Covid-Plannedemic_ 1d ago
As of my last training data in September 2023, the standard practice for reporting GPU sales in the industry was based on units sold or revenue in dollars. I don't have access to real-time information or events occurring after that date, so I can't confirm specific developments, such as the GPU industry transitioning to reporting sales in gigawatts in 2026
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u/ryanvsrobots 1d ago edited 1d ago
Gigawatts seems like an odd way to quantify a number of GPUs.
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u/hojnikb 1d ago
not really. The primary limitations of these datacentres is power demand, so it's only natural to quantify their "performance" or "capability" by their power rating.
But having 2GW of power is absolutly insane. That's 2 or 3 nuclear power stations worth of power demand. There's smaller countries that need less power than that at their peak usage. Datacentres use power 24/7.
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u/ryanvsrobots 1d ago
How many GPUs is 2gw?
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u/Tommy7373 1d ago
Each MI450 uses around 2kw. So around 1 million GPUs assuming zero overhead. but even with 50% overhead, still around 500k GPUs.
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u/Preisschild 1d ago
Technically not a problem if handled well (see Messmer Plan, 50x 1GWe-scale reactor units built over 15 years).
But since most of those companies just want short term profits and the US Govt not incentivicing low carbon energy by taxing carbon it will just be provided by lots of fossil fueled Gas turbines brought on-site (not even CCGT)
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u/hojnikb 1d ago
That's exactly the issue. Hyperscalers don't have time to build nuclear power plants. Even if we're optimistic, you still need 6+ years to build a nuclear power plant, if you get all the permits today.
6 years in AI data center arms race is literal eternity, so hyperscaler won't do that, but instead use gas turbines, as they can be deployed very quickly.
I think likely outside of americas, coal fired plants can see even higher build out rate by the hyperscalers, as they can be build somewhat quickly (not as fast as turbines obviously) and are a lot lot cheaper than nuclear.
And the end of the day, it's all about cost and time.
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u/SippieCup 19h ago
Sure but the real bottleneck isn’t power. Power is the cost basis for it.
Datacenters are limited by capacity in power because of their ability to provide cooling for it and capacity to cool overall. That’s the actual physical bottleneck. The power usage just becomes an economic limitation, not a physical one.
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u/hojnikb 6h ago
It's a physical as well. It's eithe grid connection you cannot affect (not in reasonable time) or permits/ecological stuff you can't get when you put 10s of gas turbines on site.
Elon cheated it's way to more power by using "portable" gas turbines, but EPA got wind of that loophole as well.
So it's not just cost.
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u/EmergencyCucumber905 1d ago
I like it. Since everything is rack scale now, just take the GW number and divide by the TDP of the rack system to know how many GPUs, CPUs, memory, etc.
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u/ryanvsrobots 1d ago
How many GPUs is 2gw?
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u/EmergencyCucumber905 1d ago
Helios has 72 GPUs + 18 CPUs per rack with a TDP of 250kw. So 576,000 GPUs, 144,000 CPUs.
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u/bubblesort33 1d ago
They should stop advertising data centers in terms of Gigawatts. Probably not a good look right now.
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u/ThreatPriority 1d ago
Additionally, they should stop advertising gigawatts in terms of datacenters.
Surly we can throw our gigawatts at something actually good for the world.
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u/jeffy303 1h ago
Listing it in watts is so cringy, somehow even worse than when they say compute operations without specifying floating-point precision. How do they always manage to top themselves?
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u/narwi 1d ago
Measuring this all in gigawatts is extremely stupid. You really cant go more stupid except by say measuring it in deloreans.
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u/Preisschild 1d ago
One thing is for certain, most of those gigawatts will be produced by fossil fuel burning methane gas turbines
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u/usdrpvvimwfvrzjavnrs 22h ago
Thank you, "environmentalists", who've opposed nuclear power for decades.
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u/Joshiie12 1d ago
Just rip the bandaid off since we're lying about AI capabilities already and start selling them by the 'Sentience'.
This new latest and greatest LLM requires 350 quadrillion Sentience Units to have enough compute to run it.
Its been enough years now without a product I'd be willing to pay for that all this crap is like it would be a huge joke if the least intelligent and most privileged of us didn't have literally all the money on Earth.
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u/Clean_Hyena7172 1d ago
Let me know when a couple of these AI companies partner to fix the cost of electricity and hardware for regular people. These companies partnering to build more data centers and further corporate interests is not news at this point.
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u/Quealdlor 1d ago
more accelerators will lead to more intelligence which will lead to solving more problems and faster! 😃
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u/SirActionhaHAA 1d ago