Without getting all the way down to performance counters, GPU power from nvidia-smi is a better indicator of true utilization than job scheduling or “gpu busy”. I would love to see animated “heat maps” of the big data centers, with each pixel being an individual GPU’s power draw. I am confident that inference and frontier training at the big labs is highly efficient, but I wonder how many GPUs would be dark due to scheduling and inefficient research code. With a little calibration for base load and peak, just the power bill for the datacenter would be a pretty good first order indicator of utilization.

→ View original post on X — @id_aa_carmack, 2026-04-02 14:49 UTC