GPUs versus TPUs, depreciating GPUs and data centers that may never be built - Cool Vector experts take you inside the issues causing the most uncertainty in the global data center market.

A year ago, TD Cowan's Michael Elias roiled the data center world when he reported Microsoft was pulling back from some of its projects. Today, a "winner take most" urgency continues to drive the market, but hyperscalers increasingly are aware that what is being built today may not be optimized for the compute needs of tomorrow.

In "Inside the 'Winner Take Most' Hyperscaler Battle," Cool Vector's David Snow speaks with Elias, the Director of Equity Research for Communications Infrastructure at TD Cowen, Eli Scher, Managing Partner at United Integrity Advisors, and Phillip Koblence a Cool Vector editorial director, as well as COO of NYI, CEO of Critical Ventures, UIA and a co-founder of Nomad Futurist. Among the takeaways of this lively conversation:

• Why Microsoft’s pullback was less a demand collapse than a pipeline triage. What initially appeared to be a hyperscaler retreat was in fact a selective pruning of under-deliverable projects, coinciding with workload redistribution toward partners such as Oracle and CoreWeave. “They went through and they culled the pipeline and removed the stuff that didn’t make sense," says Scher.

• Why forecasted compute demand continues to be impossible to keep up with, and why some data center developers will get "a bit over their skiis" along the way, says Elias.

• The entrance of "GPU on demand" players like CoreWeave is confusing some market observers as to the ultimate source of demand, causing some to wonder, "Who's workload is it anyway?"

• Depreciation schedules of data center assets are central to business models, but no one knows the true life of new GPU chips. One problem, say our experts, is that GPUs are designed to run parallel workloads, but actual future workload needs may end up being more focused, making chips like Google's TPUs a more cost-effective solution.

• Why GPU deployment is pushing the "upper bounds" of data center infrastructure.

Follow Cool Vector on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cool-vector-media/

#coolvector #datacenter #microsoft #gpu #digitalinfrastructure