100,000 H100s: How We Built the World's Most Expensive Radiator
Today marks a historic milestone for Imhof Web Services: we've deployed our 100,000th NVIDIA H100 GPU. That's 8 petabytes of HBM3 memory, 70 megawatts of power consumption, and enough thermal output to heat a small European nation.
The Road to 100,000
When we founded IWS in early 2024 with a vision of "making cloud computing unaffordable," we never imagined we'd hit 100,000 H100s this quickly. Actually, we never imagined we'd hit 100,000 H100s at all. NVIDIA was just really eager to sell them.
Key milestones on our journey:
- January 2024: First 1,000 H100s deployed in Darmstadt. Heated 12 apartments.
- March 2024: Reached 10,000 H100s. Property developers started calling us.
- June 2024: 50,000 H100s. Jensen Huang sent a fruit basket.
- October 2024: 100,000 H100s. We can now be seen from space (thermally).
By the Numbers
Our 100,000 H100 fleet represents:
- $4 billion in hardware (at list price; we got a discount*)
- 8 PB of HBM3 memory (enough to store 2 million copies of ImageNet)
- 198 exaFLOPS of FP8 compute (half of which is used for cryptocurrency, allegedly)
- 70 MW of power consumption (equivalent to a small city)
- 60 MW of heat output (enough for 8,500 apartments)
- $42 million/month in electricity bills (we don't like to talk about this)
*The discount was negotiated by promising NVIDIA we'd put their logo on everything. Hence why everything says "Nvidia-native."
The World's Most Expensive Radiator
At $4 billion for hardware that's primarily used to generate heat, we've effectively built history's most expensive heating system. For comparison:
- A typical apartment radiator: $200
- Central heating system for an apartment building: $50,000
- District heating plant for a neighborhood: $10 million
- IWS GPU infrastructure: $4,000,000,000
However, our radiator can also train large language models, which your typical hydronic system cannot. Checkmate, traditional HVAC.
What's Next?
With 100,000 H100s deployed, where do we go from here?
- 200,000 H100s by mid-2025: We've already placed orders
- Blackwell B200 deployment: Coming Q1 2025 (see our other blog post)
- 1 million GPUs by 2027: Aspirational goal that our CFO refuses to approve
- Heat an entire country: We're in talks with Luxembourg
Thank You
This milestone wouldn't be possible without:
- Our customers, who pay extraordinary amounts for GPU compute
- Our investors, who believe "heating apartments with AI" is a viable business model
- NVIDIA, for making GPUs that are essentially space heaters with tensor cores
- The residents of our heated apartments, for not complaining about the fan noise
- The laws of thermodynamics, for ensuring that compute = heat
Here's to the next 100,000. And the next heating bill.