the best hardware quote you could get was at a >100% markup!
Now I’m really curious - if you can share - how much did you pay, and when was it? Are you talking about 40GB or 80GB cards? How did you negotiate? Any attempts I made were shut down with simple “no, that’s our final price”. What’s the secret?
At a startup that specializes in ML research and work the CEO is going to be intimately familiar with ML workloads, needs, and hardware requirements.
I work at a startup which builds hardware accelerators, primarily for large NLP models. It’s a large part of my job is to be intimately familiar with ML workloads, needs, and hardware requirements. Our CEO definitely doesn’t have enough of that knowledge to choose the right hardware for our ML team. In fact even most people on our ML team don’t have deep up to date knowledge about GPUs, GPU servers, or GPU server clusters. I happen to know because I always had interest in hardware and I’ve been building GPU clusters since grad school.
As mentioned in another comment, the contract has very clear language not to share it - likely because they are offering different prices to different companies.
So I don't feel comfortable sharing any specifics, especially since this account is directly tied to my name.
With that being said, the negotiation process was pretty straightforward:
- Emailed several vendors telling them we are a small startup, we are looking to make many purchases, but right now we are starting with one. We told everyone our purchasing decision was solely based on cost (given equivalent hardware) and to please put your best quote forward.
- Got back all of our prices. Went to the second cheapest one and told them they were beat and offered them the ability to go lower, which they did. We went with that vendor.
- For our next purchase, we went to the original lowest vendor (who got beat out), told them they lost out to price, and if they can go lower than that we would go with them and continue to give them business moving forward. They went quite a bit lower than what they originally offered, and what the vendor we first purchased from gave. We bought our second order from them and have used them ever since.
Now I’m really curious - if you can share - how much did you pay, and when was it? Are you talking about 40GB or 80GB cards? How did you negotiate? Any attempts I made were shut down with simple “no, that’s our final price”. What’s the secret?
At a startup that specializes in ML research and work the CEO is going to be intimately familiar with ML workloads, needs, and hardware requirements.
I work at a startup which builds hardware accelerators, primarily for large NLP models. It’s a large part of my job is to be intimately familiar with ML workloads, needs, and hardware requirements. Our CEO definitely doesn’t have enough of that knowledge to choose the right hardware for our ML team. In fact even most people on our ML team don’t have deep up to date knowledge about GPUs, GPU servers, or GPU server clusters. I happen to know because I always had interest in hardware and I’ve been building GPU clusters since grad school.