The period from 2023 when Nvidia's H100 could not be bought at any price by anyone without a relationship, when startups raised money to secure allocation rather than the reverse, when Sam Altman said the company was 'so GPU-limited' that it was delaying features, and when a billionaire describing himself as begging for chips was the industry's honest portrait. It eased as supply grew; the entry stays open.
A 2023 startup pitch deck reported to list 'we have GPUs' as the first bullet point. The record notes that it was the strongest claim in the deck and that the investors agreed.
The record notes that the shortage was the first in computing history in which the scarce item cost tens of thousands of dollars and was still described as cheap by the people who could get it.
Someone remembers a 2023 cloud dashboard showing no capacity in any region and refreshing it hourly. The record notes that an entire tier of company, on file under CoreWeave, was built on that refresh.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
