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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2026
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I dont believe the memory, both ram and storage combine, are what's causing data centres to gobble up power and associated resources (electricity, cooling,...).
Its the GPUs.
I'm not counting on a future with LLMs by any means, but there's tons of efficiencies we can do to make the cost go down. Were just not doing it.
We saw the same thing with crypto mining. It started on GPUs but then speficially designed silicon (asyc miners) were vastly more efficient than a GPU rig.
It still needed memory yes, but again, thats not the constraint.
For crypto mining, the speed of computation before the next block was mined was the constraint so GPUs were being used for parallel computation before ASIC miners were built. This is a great example of where ASICs shine: deterministic simple algorithms that don't require much if any I/O.
LLMs have a minimum RAM requirement in order to even load the model so even if you built a dedicated LLM card with an ASIC, you would still need at least that amount of RAM on the card. You'd probably want more RAM in order to store context because that takes RAM as well. At that point you pretty much have a GPU with an ASIC instead of more general compute units and no video outputs.
You might get some improvements by using an ASIC for LLMs but not nearly as much as when ASICs started being used for mining.