#HBM

We cut our RAM in half for the Tesla AI5 chip (now 72GB of LP5) and 1/3 for AI6 (now 144GB of LP6). This was the only way to get enough volume for Optimus production and greatly reduces cost. As it turns out, we think this will have a negligible effect on Optimus performance, as memory bandwidth is a bigger limiting factor than total memory storage (bandwidth was held constant).

Fentanyl Grade Compute: Why a GB300 Rack Will Out-Price Blow by Weight in 2030 A GB300 NVL72 weighs roughly 1,580 kg fully populated and recent purchase orders put it at $5M per rack. That is $3,165/kg. Strip out the 1.5 tons of busbar, manifold and coolant and the GPU packages alone are well into gold territory, but we're pricing the rack, because that's what you actually take delivery of. Where that sits on the illicit commodity curve today ($/kg): $2,400 Cannabis flower $3,165 GB300 NVL72 $3,500 Fentanyl $28,000 Cocaine $65,000 Heroin $138,000 Gold So today NVIDIA ships a product that is denser in value than weed, roughly fentanyl-grade, and still an order of magnitude short of cocaine. For now... GB200 NVL72 was $4M, GB300 is ~$5M, and Vera Rubin NVL72 is already quoted at up to $8.8M at essentially the same rack mass. Rack weight is constrained by the datacenter floor loading; rack price is constrained by nothing. That's ~1.75x $/kg per generation with HBM, CoWoS and power all supply-limited through the decade. Cocaine: Colombia's new president has pledged a hard-line security crackdown with $1B in US aid behind it Every prior crackdown has consolidated the industry into fewer, better-capitalized operators with better logistics and higher yields per hectare. Consolidation is deflationary. We model US wholesale drifting from ~$28k/kg toward ~$12k/kg by 2030 as the supply chain professionalizes. **Crossover: 2030.** Our extrapolated NVL72-class rack hits ~$17k/kg while wholesale cocaine falls to ~$12k/kg. At that point the rational cartel pivots to smuggling racks, except a rack has a fixed 500+ kW power draw, a 3,300 lb forklift requirement and an export-control regime that is actually enforced. Cocaine has none of these problems, which is why it will remain the superior product for anyone without a substation. Key risks to the thesis: US retail coke is still ~$60–200/g, i.e. $60k–200k/kg so the crossover only holds at wholesale. Retail compute (H100 hour on a neocloud) is also marked up, so we consider this an apples-to-apples wholesale comparison. Full model available to Coke Research subscribers.

TrendForce explains why 4-Hi HBM isn’t enough. (Personally, I think memory makers wouldn’t produce 4-Hi HBM even if it were enough.) https://open.substack.com/pub/trendforceinsights/p/4hi-hbm-edge-ai-data-center?r=4k4uta&utm_medium=ios

One Micron 245TB SSD replaces eight spindles and hands back 55W per server. Swap 17,456 HDDs for 2,182 of them and the freed 120kW runs an entire GB200 NVL72. An exabyte fits in 6 racks instead of 22. https://www.storagereview.com/review/micron-6600-ion-245tb-swap-the-hard-drives-power-an-nvl72-for-free#SSD #DataCenter #AI @MicronTech