We can generate similar conclusions in lots of other ways. Intel’s annual revenue is larger than Google’s. The semiconductor industry is an order of magnitude larger than Google. If Google spent literally every dollar they owned on chips, never mind powering them, writing code for them, or even putting them in data centers, then Google might be able to buy 15% of the world’s computer chips. That still wouldn’t be equivalent to “Google now controls a very large proportion of the world’s computing resources.”
And compute power isn’t fungible. GPUs are worthless for a lot of applications. You can’t run a calculation on a million servers spread out across the globe unless you’re doing something very easy like SETI@home. Most algorithms aren’t trivial to split into a million pieces that don’t need to talk to each other.
Okay. I amend my statement to “For every year except for 2013 where Google’s revenue was $55.5 billion while Intel’s was $52.7 billion Intel’s annual revenue has been larger than Google’s.”
At the same time, while Intel is a significant fraction of the semiconductor industry, it’s still almost an order of magnitude smaller than the industry as a whole.
According to your own link that $7B number appears to be Google’s total capital expenses, much of which seems to be devoted to buying land and building new buildings. While many of those buildings may be data centers, $7B in capital expenses is not equivalent to $7B spent on data centers. Google Fiber for instance would be included in “capital expenses” but is not an investment in a data center. Even neglecting non-data center spending, the chips that go inside of the computers in the data center are a small proportion of the total cost of the data center, so that’s not a particularly useful number to throw around without any context.
Do you actually believe the statement “Google now controls a very large proportion of the world’s computing resources”?
We haven’t really nailed down what “a very large proportion” would be; I’m just trying to estimate what the actual fraction is.
Looking at the semiconductor industry market share data that you linked, I notice that numbers 2-11 represent SoCs, DRAM, flash, communication ICs, power ICs, microcontrollers, basically everything except for server CPUs and GPUs. If we look at just the parts that are potentially relevant to AI, the non-mobile CPU market seems to firmly belong to Intel, while the non-mobile GPU market belongs to AMD and nVidia ($5 and $3.6B revenues, respectively).
It’s still not very clear to me how much Google spends directly on computation; the author of the linked article seemed to think the $7B was mostly on datacenters. Even if it’s only a fraction of that, it’s a lot. Compare to the largest supercomputres: Tianhe-2 cost $390M and Titan cost $97M, according to their respective Wikipedia pages.)
While those conclusions appear to be drawn from data that is several years old, it seems reasonable to assume that Google hasn’t grown at a rate substantially different from the industry as a whole.
Maybe they own 4% of the world’s servers, but very probably not 10% and certainly not 40%.
We can generate similar conclusions in lots of other ways. Intel’s annual revenue is larger than Google’s. The semiconductor industry is an order of magnitude larger than Google. If Google spent literally every dollar they owned on chips, never mind powering them, writing code for them, or even putting them in data centers, then Google might be able to buy 15% of the world’s computer chips. That still wouldn’t be equivalent to “Google now controls a very large proportion of the world’s computing resources.”
And compute power isn’t fungible. GPUs are worthless for a lot of applications. You can’t run a calculation on a million servers spread out across the globe unless you’re doing something very easy like SETI@home. Most algorithms aren’t trivial to split into a million pieces that don’t need to talk to each other.
From Wikipedia, 2013 revenues:
Google: $60B
Intel: $53B
Qualcomm: $25B
TSMC: $14B
Google spending on datacenters: $7B
GlobalFoundries: $5B
AMD: $5B
ARM Holdings: $0.7B
Okay. I amend my statement to “For every year except for 2013 where Google’s revenue was $55.5 billion while Intel’s was $52.7 billion Intel’s annual revenue has been larger than Google’s.” At the same time, while Intel is a significant fraction of the semiconductor industry, it’s still almost an order of magnitude smaller than the industry as a whole.
According to your own link that $7B number appears to be Google’s total capital expenses, much of which seems to be devoted to buying land and building new buildings. While many of those buildings may be data centers, $7B in capital expenses is not equivalent to $7B spent on data centers. Google Fiber for instance would be included in “capital expenses” but is not an investment in a data center. Even neglecting non-data center spending, the chips that go inside of the computers in the data center are a small proportion of the total cost of the data center, so that’s not a particularly useful number to throw around without any context.
Do you actually believe the statement “Google now controls a very large proportion of the world’s computing resources”?
We haven’t really nailed down what “a very large proportion” would be; I’m just trying to estimate what the actual fraction is.
Looking at the semiconductor industry market share data that you linked, I notice that numbers 2-11 represent SoCs, DRAM, flash, communication ICs, power ICs, microcontrollers, basically everything except for server CPUs and GPUs. If we look at just the parts that are potentially relevant to AI, the non-mobile CPU market seems to firmly belong to Intel, while the non-mobile GPU market belongs to AMD and nVidia ($5 and $3.6B revenues, respectively).
It’s still not very clear to me how much Google spends directly on computation; the author of the linked article seemed to think the $7B was mostly on datacenters. Even if it’s only a fraction of that, it’s a lot. Compare to the largest supercomputres: Tianhe-2 cost $390M and Titan cost $97M, according to their respective Wikipedia pages.)
From what I’ve seen Google probably owns around 2-3% of the world’s servers, which is probably on the order of 2 million machines.
Google claims that their datacenters use 1% of the estimated electricity consumption for data centers world wide and that their data centers are about twice as efficient as the average data center.
While those conclusions appear to be drawn from data that is several years old, it seems reasonable to assume that Google hasn’t grown at a rate substantially different from the industry as a whole.
Maybe they own 4% of the world’s servers, but very probably not 10% and certainly not 40%.