A network of forty thousand GPUs would cost the company about $130 million, and though Google regularly invested such enormous sums of money in its data center hardware, it had never invested in hardware like this. So Dean and Giannandrea took their request to Alan Eustace, who was about to make his leap from the stratosphere. Eustace understood. He took the request to Larry Page, and just before he broke Baumgartner’s skydiving record in a scuba suit,2 he secured $130 million in graphic chips. Less than a month after the chips were installed, all forty thousand of them were running around the
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