The Exponential Demand for Compute

Infrastructure Sector Brief

Top of Mind

The exponential rise in demand for compute (i.e., digital work) is driven by a number of emerging technologies, most notably artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and the metaverse.

• AI: Training and running AI algorithms and models require the use of significant compute resources. Stablility.AI, the creators of Stable Diffusion – a text-to-image generator, used 4,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs running in AWS’ cloud to train their AI models. This cost them more than $50 million over the course of a month.
• IoT: As more physical devices are connected to the internet, the amount of data generated and collected will sky rocket. This data will need to be processed and analyzed, increasing the demand for compute resources.
• Metaverse: Venture capitalist Matthew Ball stated that the metaverse alone will require the greatest ongoing computational requirements in history. Entire economies, game engines, holographic displays, and extended-reality experiences will need to be rendered for millions or even billions of individuals simultaneously.

Additionally, the increasing popularity of streaming services and online gaming has further contributed to the skyrocketing demand for compute. As traditional industries such as manufacturing, construction, and healthcare continue to adopt digital tools and services, the need for compute power will only continue to grow.