Not just the outside, but pulls out the trays and modules. You get to see Astera Labs retimers and Broadcom networking boards as well.
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This Supermicro part number appears in the early part of the video.
SYS-821GE-TNHR.
I searched for a price. It appears on Newegg’s website here for around $297,000.
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16816139568
Another site sells same part number for $320,000. Configuration selections will drive some price differences, but $300k is a bunch for an 8-GPU server.
But this this looks similar to what Coreweave is renting to users for $50 / hour. GPU Cloud Pricing | CoreWeave
If this is similar, that means Coreweave must rent out a unit for 1.7 years to break even. That seems like poor economics for them. If the demand for GPU computing services is as big as we hear, I would think they could charge more to rent time to anxious clients. Anyone here familiar enough with the GPU/AI industry to comment?
UPDATE Jan 27: I botched the math. Doing correctly this time:
300,000 dollars / 50 dollars/hour = 6000 hours rental to pay the cost.
6000 hours / 24 hours/day = 250 days to repay. Much better economics. The older series are dirt cheap now but these still pay well.
Thanks to MARK R for pointing out my error.
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I doubt Coreweave buys their servers from NewEgg, lol.
How these servers are configured affects the price considerably. Here’s a link to the same part number that’s an order of magnitude cheaper (under $22k):
Of course, that’s probably without the GPUs, CPUs, etc., which have to be configured and included to make a running server. I don’t think one can really say what Coreweave’s economics are from these retail prices.
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Standard retail markup is ~100% from the price they paid to a distributor. And CoreWeave most likely gets a better price than that which a distributor gets. Hence, your math is still off by quite a lot.I won’t venture a guess as to what their payback period is, but I’m confident that the math looks good to them.
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