According to CoinDesk, the unveiling of OpenAI's text-to-video generator Sora has sparked interest in the crypto market, leading to a surge in AI tokens. However, to make this technology mainstream, a staggering amount of compute power will be required, necessitating more server-grade H100 GPUs than Nvidia produces in a year or what its largest customers collectively use in their data centers. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) will be needed, more than what are currently in use by tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, and Google combined.
Following the first demo of Sora, there was a renewed interest in AI tokens, with many surging in the aftermath. This led to the emergence of many crypto AI projects promising to do text-to-video and text-to-image generation. The AI token category now has a $25 billion market cap according to CoinGecko data. Behind the promise of AI-generated videos are armies of GPUs, the processors from the likes of Nvidia and AMD, which make the AI revolution possible thanks to their ability to compute large volumes of data.
A recent research report by Factorial Funds estimates that 720,000 high-end Nvidia H100 GPUs are required to support the creator community of TikTok and YouTube. Sora, according to Factorial Funds, requires up to 10,500 powerful GPUs for a month to train and can generate only about 5 minutes of video per hour per GPU for inference. As more people and companies start using AI models like Sora to generate videos, the computer power needed to create new videos (inference) will become greater than the power needed to train the AI model initially.
While Nvidia is a key player in the AI revolution, it's not the only one. Its chip rival AMD makes competing products, and investors have also rewarded the company, pushing its stock from the $2 range in the fall of 2012 to over $175 today. There are also other ways to outsource computing power to GPU farms. Render (RNDR) offers distributed GPU computing, as does Akash Network (AKT). However, the majority of the GPUs on these networks are retail-grade gaming GPUs which are significantly less powerful than Nvidia's server-grade H100 or AMD's competition. Despite the promise of text-to-video, which Sora and other protocols promise, it is going to require a herculean hardware lift. While it's an intriguing premise and could revolutionize Hollywood's creative workflow, don't expect it to become mainstream anytime soon.
