It’s a capex and that type of hardware needs to be replaced every 3 years minimum and you need people to set it up and maintain a cluster. And it’s not straight forward.
You are never going to get that approved without a serious business case.
Claude on the other end is a opex and much easier to just try out and then build a solution on it
Not saying it doesn’t happen but it’s not as easy as people make it sound like
It’s 3 years if you’re trying to be competitive on frontier models and generally capex is preferred to opex because opex never ends
I don’t think anyone’s building a cluster for their business right now, but one single rack after Claude gets rid of their subscription options? Might be a good deal.
400k on a DGX node starts seeming like a great deal when your employees each start using a few hundred dollars worth of Claude tokens every month. That one node can handle a lot of users depending on the model used.
It’s an expense once every maybe 5 or 6 years in reality and you don’t need to hire new people, you just give your existing sysadmins some extra work. They’ll complain, but they’ll still do it.
Of course the sensible alternative is to use a decent model off openrouter for peanuts but then you’re sending all your sensitive business secrets to China which is even worse than sharing them with a US AI company. And people WILL be sharing secrets lol
If it’s a large enough company to have hundreds of users, it can afford several beefy machines tbh
It’s a capex and that type of hardware needs to be replaced every 3 years minimum and you need people to set it up and maintain a cluster. And it’s not straight forward.
You are never going to get that approved without a serious business case.
Claude on the other end is a opex and much easier to just try out and then build a solution on it
Not saying it doesn’t happen but it’s not as easy as people make it sound like
It’s 3 years if you’re trying to be competitive on frontier models and generally capex is preferred to opex because opex never ends
I don’t think anyone’s building a cluster for their business right now, but one single rack after Claude gets rid of their subscription options? Might be a good deal.
Capex never ends either if it’s hardware. Also you need opex to run it
400k on a DGX node starts seeming like a great deal when your employees each start using a few hundred dollars worth of Claude tokens every month. That one node can handle a lot of users depending on the model used.
It’s an expense once every maybe 5 or 6 years in reality and you don’t need to hire new people, you just give your existing sysadmins some extra work. They’ll complain, but they’ll still do it.
Of course the sensible alternative is to use a decent model off openrouter for peanuts but then you’re sending all your sensitive business secrets to China which is even worse than sharing them with a US AI company. And people WILL be sharing secrets lol
If only it was that simple