WoW: Forever takes 250,000 GB of memory to run, and I can't even joke about Sam Altman being jealous because that's almost nothing compared to the monolithic demands of AI
That's a lotta gigs.
Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games require a significant amount of server infrastructure to function, but the demands of the AI industry far exceed those of even the largest MMOs. According to official WoW X account, the MMO game "WoW Forever" runs on approximately 3,924 virtual machines, 251,136 GB of memory, and 70,480 CPU cores.
To put this into perspective, a high-end budget CPU costs around $110 and has six cores. This means that the 70,480 CPU cores alone would cost around $1.2 million. While it may seem exorbitant, it is still a small fraction of the hardware required to run an AI datacenter. For example, a recent AI rack cluster boasted about 1.4 petabytes of memory, which is roughly 1.4 million GB, and around 4,200 CPUs.
Indeed, Microsoft spends billions annually on AI investments, making the server infrastructure for "WoW Forever" appear minuscule in comparison.
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- Sam Altman joked about AI's thirst for memory with a new social media nickname businessinsider.com
