It sure seems that way. The stock options are worth, at the current price of AMD stock, about 32.8 Billion dollars. AMD is giving out these stock options essentially for free in exchange of open ai purchasing chips from AMD.
So open ai are getting a 32.8 billion dollars rebate. But on what? Here the press releases are a bit vague. They say that Open ai committed to buying six gigawatts of AMD chips. Anybody know how to convert that into money?
I figure these GPUs are typically around 1kW (unclear if 6GW is including overhead like cooling, which might double(?) the power), so in the range of 3-6M GPUs.
If these are somewhere in the range of $10-30k (who knows what current or future models are contemplated), that's $30-180B. So clearly the low end doesn't make sense for the 'rebate', but at the high end a ~17% discount doesn't seem unreasonable.
No this is an attempt to shift the burden of taxation to the middle class and poor. It is a consumption tax pure and simple. If you tax everything like sneakers and toothpaste the tax burden shifts to the middle class and poor because a billionaire can make income 100 times larger than a middle class person but he does not use a hundred times as much toothpaste and does not buy 100 times more sneakers.
This of course will depress consumption which will seriously damage the economy but the current administration just does not have the brains to consider these effects.
Furthermore, the immigrant chasing is seriously reducing jobs openings. This seems quite the opposite from the intended effect. But it is done so chaotically and with such cruelty that it is flat out destroying businesses rather than allowing them to hire citizens to replace illegal immigrants.
Most people don’t want the jobs done by immigrants—not at the pay levels that the immigrants are willing to take. This idea that getting rid of the “illegals” frees up jobs for locals is complete rubbish.
If you really want to free up jobs for locals, get rid of the HB1 program.
Wrong, solar is cheap and probably the cheapest energy source a household can get if they have a sunny roof. Source - I have solar, have done the math.
It's not ideal for everyone's situation but it's damn cheap. One of my neighbors has solar panels, no battery or storage of any kind, we don't have net metering here, and their electric bill is single digits.
Not only that, the demand from AI Data Centers is going to push up the price of electricity tremendously. Add in demand from electric vehicles too and there could be shortages as well. Who knows, but one thing is certain: demand for electricity is going to skyrocket.
Having an alternative source for your house is a wise idea.
Don't worry the utilities will still make sure you pay their fees. Watch the markets move from paying per kwh or demand charges to just straight up fees. Its disheartening.
Wouldn’t it just make more sense to use nuclear and keep the grid reliable so individual homeowners don’t need to worry about huge blackouts ruining their quality of life?
Nuclear is very expensive to build. It takes a long time to build. Also, it takes quite a bit of time to power up and power down a nuclear power plant. Nuclear plants use a lot of water. Water that could be used to cool the AI hardware.
As a result nuclear power isn't cheap.
Then there is still the safety issues and environmental concerns regarding the waste. Some people say they are safe now and you can just bury the waste deep underground. Putting it deep underground seems a bit like just pumping the carbon into the air: someone else's problem further down the line in time.
Do you want to live next to a Nuclear Power Plant?
I live in Minnesota, we get about 34% less sun than most of the southern states like Arizona or Florida.
Arizona - 3,800 hours of sunlight hours per year
Minnesota - 2,500 hours of sunlight hours per year
Ergo, I can't generate as much energy as someone who lives in a state that gets significantly more sunlight.
I would also add that setup and installation of even a small solar array has an ROI of around 10 years because I can't generate as much energy, therefore it takes longer for me to break even.
Right now in Minnesota:
The average cost of installing a 5 kW solar panel system in Minnesota is approximately $14,900 before applying the 30% federal tax credit, which can significantly reduce the overall expense. After incentives, the out-of-pocket cost can be around $13,860
Sorry, I'm not going to lay out 15K and then have to wait ten years before I break even. If you want to know why people aren't adopting solar, this is the reason. Its cost prohibitive for many, many people.
Does it make sense for people in those Southern states? 100%. For everybody else? Not so much.
You can finance the purchase to avoid upfront payments. And in many cases, the energy savings exceed the finance payments, resulting in a net monthly gain from a cash flow basis with no upfront payment.
>> You can finance the purchase to avoid upfront payments.
Yeah and then you pay interest on the loan. Which then makes it EVEN MORE expensive AND lengthens your ROI just to break even.
FYI you're not "saving" anything until A) Your loan is paid off and B) Your array is generating enough energy to compensate for your existing energy use.
Your numbers just don't add up:
$15,000 for a 5Kw array.
$15,000 loan with a VERY generous 5% interest rate on an also very generous 6 year term.
Interest paid over six years: $4,500
Total paid after six years: $19,500
Monthly payments would be around $240.00
The average monthly cost of electricity for Minneapolis is about $190.00 which is about 1,097kWh
The monthly average your 5kWh array can generate in a month (assuming optimal conditions) is around 700kWh. Leaving you with a deficit of 397kWh you still need to pay for.
So no, I'm not seeing how the cost savings will exceed your finance payments. It will eventually pay for itself once you get outside of that ROI period. And then what? You get 15 years of free electricity which amounts to:
$190.00 * 12 = $2,280
$2,280 * 15 = $34,200
So then, over 25 years, your net gain is about: $14,000? Which is about $560/year?
Every single year I talk to companies and the cost has gone down, barely. I've been told every year for the last 20 years that technology is getting so much better. The panels are so much more efficient, cost less, the state and federal govt have tax breaks, blah blah, blah. The Chinese have found a way to produce them this way and that way, "Oh you just wait, its really going to be affordable in the next few years!"
No, its still not affordable. If it were, like OP said you would see them on every house in your neighborhood.
I've wanted to put solar on my house for very long time and every year its the same thing. "Finance a $15,000 loan and in ten years you'll have free electricity!!"
I would say anybody who's rational, informed and interested looking at that would 100% of the time its not worth it.
Solar module prices over the past 20 years went from $2/watt to $.3/watt. Installed prices are a little more, going from maybe $6/watt to ~ $3/watt. I paid about $3.5/watt installed in Berkeley 3 years ago, a place not known for affordability. In the meantime, (average in the US) electricity rates went from ~$.10/kW to about $.16/kW. If over that period, your payback period has remained constant, you must have dramatically (like 20x ) reduced your power usage. Congratulations!
Having solar myself, I completely agree with you that solar is - comparatively - cheap. But because it is cheap, the argument goes that you don't really need to subsidy it.
There are many reasons for subsidies and it is a complex field. I was not discussing subsidies I was replying to a flat out false statement that solar is very expensive.
When discussing solar subsidies one should keep several things in mind:
- Federal solar subsidies are expiring at the end of this year thanks to Trumps tax law with a name so ridiculous I shall not repeat it.
- This news item is talking about money that has already been granted. This is especially screwed up because these are situation where the government has already promised to pay and people have been making investments and putting in work in expectation of payment.
- Solar is actually much less subsidized than nuclear. In many cases solar subsidies will help the taxpayer avoid costs as they avoid much more expensive nuclear subsidies.
If so, please ask your representatives to copy Germany's "Balkonkraftwerk" rules.
We've got one, cost €350 including delivery and a balcony railing mounting kit, could've been €250 if we'd collected and not had the stands. Whole thing is trivial DIY, no skill or training needed: you literally just assemble the kit and plug it into a power socket, register it online as a small power station, and you're done.
Sure, the legal limit of 800 W output sure isn't a huge supply, but at that cost it's also a no-brainer — at €350, it will pay for itself in 1y8m.
With the notable difference that lawn flamingos are not necessary because of the terrible energy policies of the government, whilst balkonkartoffel are.
In other words you have lawn flamingos because you have bad taste not because the government impoverished you.
"Eyesore" is in your own opinion. What I've seen on balconies around here, anything covering them is a 50% chance of being an improvement — and unlike some acquaintances, I've not encountered balkon-FKK. And IMO they're a big improvement over, e.g. the AC units on the skyscraper walls of Manhatten.
I have balkonkraftwerk because they're a 60% return on investment, per year for 35 years, tax free and self-adjusting for inflation. By far the best (reliable) investment one can make.
That €350 is currently economically worth €7350 over their lifetime in reduced energy bills, tax free. The economics are so strong that it would be worth doing even if energy was 1/3rd the current price.
I had it priced out by 5 different vendors. Only one of those 5 was in any way truthful about the reality for my particular home: "you will likely only get 15% of what others with panels might due to the shape of your roof and tree cover now and especially in 10 years." That said, WITH grid-kickbacks (all of which are not at all guaranteed), according to 4 of them, I would be looking at a net zero cost in 30-36 years.
I'm not even talking about the fact that panels MAY act like a pool for resale. Some people DO want them--again depending on your locale--most, at this point, do NOT where I live.
I was looking primarily for cost reduction and a very small percentage of saving the environment or whatever you want to call it. But; depending on your locale, home structure, etc, solar may not at all be that. If you're leaning more on the side of energy independence and eco-friendliness, maybe it's a better fit for you.
> I'm not even talking about the fact that panels MAY act like a pool for resale. Some people DO want them--again depending on your locale--most, at this point, do NOT where I live.
A roof mounted solar array easily adds $20,000 - 25,000 to reroofing a house just in labor (assuming two electricians for one week on either side of the reroofing with labor priced at $150/hr)
If I was buying a house with a solar array on the roof I would consider it to be a liability that is going to add to the TCO of the home and ask for a discount to cover the future costs of removal. The labor to remove and replace the solar array when reroofing is never going to be paid for by the solar array, it’s just an added expense to the TCO of a home.
There are plenty of people who are not aware of the added costs of a roof mounted solar array, I just happen to be aware since I sell and run electrical work for a living.
> A roof mounted solar array easily adds $20,000 - 25,000 to reroofing a house just in labor (assuming two electricians for one week on either side of the reroofing with labor priced at $150/hr)
Why do you need two electricians for a week? My rooftop solar array went up in an afternoon. They had three labourers. The (singular) electrician came in separately and worked for under and hour.
the cost to remove isn't 2 electricians for a week, it's 2 people with arms for a day. This is like saying that you would consider light fixtures a considerable TCO increase because whenever the lightbulb goes out, you'll need to pay an electrician for a day of work to change it.
The study from Compare the Market finds the average residential solar installation cost in the US is $A4/W, while Canada’s national average was $A3.65/W. By contrast, Australia’s national average was $A0.89/W, more than $A2/W cheaper.
The cheapest offers for a PV system with 10 kW of power without storage are just over €1 per watt, the most expensive are around €2 euros per watt.
All these countries have access to the same solar panels. The national minimum wage is lower in America than in the other countries. So why do American rooftop systems cost so much more? Mostly because of high "soft costs" in America:
Soft costs are the non-hardware costs associated with going solar. These costs include permitting, financing, and installing solar, as well as the expenses solar companies incur to acquire new customers, pay suppliers, and cover their bottom line. These soft costs become a portion of the overall price a customer pays for a solar energy system. While solar hardware costs have fallen in recent years, soft costs represent a growing share of total solar system costs.
First of all your post is off topic. Second of all, the reason why solar panel installations in both Australia and Germany are cheaper than the US is solar panel tariffs. Neither Australia nor the EU has solar panel tariffs. The US does. The cheapest solar panels come from China, where there is significant overproduction of panels. If you do not have tariffs you get a lot of cheap Chinese panels.
The reserves of indium are extremely small. Any new use that would increase demand would also increase the price. Also that price is for commercially pure indium. After indium is purified enough to be usable in semiconductor devices the price increases many times, possibly much more than 10 times.
Currently, the major consumers of indium are all the screens for monitors, laptops and smartphones, which use indium oxide as a transparent conductor, then the LEDs used in lighting and indicators. Also the power devices with gallium nitride contain indium, and their use is increasing.
There exist no mines of indium. Indium can be obtained as a byproduct from the extraction of other metals, primarily from zinc mining, but its concentration in zinc minerals is very small.
In order to produce more indium, one also has to produce more zinc, in an amount several orders of magnitude greater than the amount of produced indium. When the demand from indium will exceed that available from the current zinc production, further increases in demand will increase the indium price much steeper.
Except for indium, among the other chemical elements only for the platinum-group metals there is a so great mismatch between the amount that would be required by potential applications and the amount that is available on Earth. Selenium and tellurium are also close of these from this point of view.
Well if it's used as a thin film on screens, it wouldn't require much more production to make a few square centimeters more for chips to build a computer to use that screen.
We also ramped production of those screens without some major supply chain problem requiring 10x zinc production.
If you understand the underlying reasons for why an investor would buy an actively depreciating asset, then you understand why OP suggests--correctly in my opinion--that this is a non-story.
We have a housing shortage. As long as it looks like the shortage will continue, investors--people--will buy depreciating assets in the hopes that population growth will cause them to be worth more tomorrow than they are today. If it's not Private Equity, it'll be rental companies. If it's not rental companies, it'll be mom & pop landlords. If it's not mom & pop landlords, it'll be people looking for a second home or pied-a-terre with upside potential. The problem is the perpetual shortage clearly indicating increasing economic rents, instead of a trend toward the cost of production.
This is a housing crisis but most Americans are treating it like a housing whoopsie. We treat it with kid gloves, where we fight about the "correct" way to build just enough housing, in just the right places, instead of pointing a firehouse of development incentives, to the point of literally subsidizing private development and public development.
It's basic economics, but our electorate will tie itself in knots to make the housing crisis fit their niche political narrative.
Besides not enough new inventory in some areas, one major problem is allowing excessive housing hoarding and not taxing it enough to reduce gamification conditions leading to absurd exploitation. It needs much more regulation and increased progressive taxation for people/orgs who monopolize empty houses simply as speculative "investment" financial chicanery.
I agree but there's only a single factor that matters: special treatment of mortgage loans. In tax. Government guarantees, both for owners and for banks. Special interest rates. Repo with government support. The list goes on.
And now you can say "yes, but ending those will cause a crash in house prices, which will hurt a lot of people, a lot of owners", which is true, but anything you do to change house prices will cause that hurt.
In a way you can look at it as the usual problem: governments effectively sold houses, handing out cash to constituents for votes and power, and now they want, maybe even need, them back. They can't pay to get them back. That's what the argument is about. If the government wanted to buy back houses the way everyone else has to play, by paying market price, nobody would be arguing much. Because of how property taxes work, even if governments crash the housing market, say by ending mortgage guarantees, governments will lose a lot of money they have already spent.
And the fundamental problem is not the division of houses, but how many there are. Crashing house prices is only part of the problem. They need to be torn down and rebuilt denser if you want to make any difference. That also needs to be paid for.
>We have a housing shortage. As long as it looks like the shortage will continue, investors--people--will buy depreciating assets in the hopes that population growth will cause them to be worth more tomorrow than they are today
This is the most interesting point. With the current birthrate, what will these homes be worth in 30, 40 years, when depopulation is ongoing? Prices will drop, and so will supply. Look to Japan, deaths of all towns that are not major cities, I expect that to occur in the US
Yes, in 50 years, I hope we as a society respond to the struggles of people then too, instead of nit picking our way to destroying an entire two generations ability to build wealth like we have done here.
This is a very important thing to point out. So often, issues that affect normal people negatively are only afforded a little bit of coverage once in a while. If the trend persists and it is still negatively affecting the citizenship, it deserves to be in the news.
Their massive it staff provides them with a way to communicate securely and they ignore it deliberately so that their communications are not preserved for history or for future court cases.
There was a terrible spate of kidnappings in the first half of the twentieth century, the Lindbergh baby being the most notorious, but the police have gotten good at foiling them. They mark the currency, alert all the banks etc.
Most businesses turn their cash over to a bank at the end of the day, so any ransom cash that the kidnappers spend or deposit in a bank is tracked very quickly.
Of course crypto can be tracked as well, but financial institutions are required to follow authority instructions and freeze and reverse assets that may belong to kidnappers. In most crypto there is no authority to reverse the assets.
You can have a system where ids of all wallets containing stolen crypto are kept in a database and nobody does accepts any payments from these addresses. However many crypto advocates are strongly opposed to such a system.
So in conclusion, kidnapping of law abiding citizens for ordinary money has not been happening in the us for a while because the fbi had made it clear that it does not pay. But crypto is a whole other business.
It is hopeful that for all current cases the perpetrators seem to have been caught. But i am afraid there may be more attempts before criminals are convinced it does not pay.
So open ai are getting a 32.8 billion dollars rebate. But on what? Here the press releases are a bit vague. They say that Open ai committed to buying six gigawatts of AMD chips. Anybody know how to convert that into money?