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Nvidia DGX Cloud: train your own ChatGPT in a web browser for $37K a month

Nvidia DGX Cloud: train your own ChatGPT in a web browser for $37K a month

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Heck, you might be renting the exact same GPUs that Microsoft used to help train ChatGPT and Bing.

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Last week, we learnedfrom Bloomberg — that Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 graphics chips so that partner OpenAI could train the large language models (LLMs) behind Bing’s AI chatbot and ChatGPT.

Don’t have access to all that capital or space for all that hardware for your own LLM project? Nvidia’s DGX Cloud is an attempt to sell remote web access to the very same thing.

Announced today at the company’s 2023 GPU Technology Conference, the service rents virtual versions of its DGX Server boxes, each containing eight Nvidia H100 or A100 GPUs and 640GB of memory. The service includes interconnects that scale up to the neighborhood of 32,000 GPUs, storage, software, and “direct access to Nvidia AI experts who optimize your code,” starting at $36,999 a month for the A100 tier.

Wonder how much Nvidia pays Microsoft to rent its own hardware to you

Meanwhile, a physical DGX Server box can cost upwards of $200,000 for the same hardware if you’re buying it outright, and that doesn’t count the efforts companies like Microsoft say they made to build working data centers around the technology.

It’s even possible some of the GPUs you’ll be borrowing might be the exact ones Microsoft used to help train OpenAI’s models — Microsoft Azure is one of the groups that will be hosting DGX Cloud. However, Nvidia says customers will get “full-time reserved access” to the GPUs they’re renting, no need to share with anyone else. Also, Oracle will be the first partner, with Microsoft coming “next quarter,” and Google Cloud will “soon” host the platform as well.

Nvidia says Amgen is using DGX Cloud to hopefully discover new drugs faster and says insurance company cloud services provider CCC and IT provider ServiceNow are using it to train their AI models for claims processing and code generation, respectively.