Rapid hardware depreciation turns proprietary data centers into a toxic liability for consumer platforms.
Because the competitive shelf-life of AI GPUs is compressed to just a few years, leading consumer companies must outsource cloud workloads to avoid the capital drag and construction delays of building their own physical footprint.
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Google's massive multi-billion-dollar lease of SpaceX's GPU clusters illustrates how consumer platforms outsource compute to avoid the capital drag and construction delays of building proprietary facilities.
It shows a prominent consumer player outsourcing its AI workload to a third-party cloud rather than taking on the capital drag of constructing a proprietary data center network.
The rapid and immediate transition of the frontier compute standard to Vera Rubin before Blackwell has even finished scaling shows how quickly hardware depreciates and faces obsolescence.