MMOs are kinda costly to run, but as it turns out, nowhere near as costly as a datacenter. I was going to spend most of this article joking about how Sam Altman, who doesn't like that we have RAM, would be frothing at the mouth for that kind of compute power. After a bit of research I am leaving horrified at the sheer industrial heft the AI industry requires.
The numbers were revealed by the official WoW X account, which states that WoW Forever runs on about 3,924 virtual machines, 251,136 GB of memory, and 70,480 CPU cores. To give you an idea of how much server infrastructure that is, our best budget CPU goes for around $110 at the moment, and it has six cores.
Fudge the maths a bit and that's $1.2 million in cores alone. Which is pricey, don't get me wrong—though not perhaps for a company that has hundreds of thousands of players paying a sub each month.
Moreover, while it's funny to imagine Altman simply salivating at the amount of hardware that's going towards entertaining people, rather than whatever AI does, it turns out the RAM baron himself wouldn't so much as lift an eyebrow at the amount of tech it takes to run one of the biggest MMO events of the decade.
It's just actually not that much, at least, not compared to AI. 4 million GB—and around 4,200 CPUs (each of which likely have a lot of cores, so a lot more than 70,000 cores in general).
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