Some storage architectures silently consume 5 GB of DRAM and up to 4 CPU cores per GPU node. At 500 nodes, that’s 2.5 TB of DRAM and 2,000 cores lost to storage overhead — a hidden tax you can no longer afford.
NAND prices surged up to 60% in one quarter. Storage now consumes up to 30% of the infrastructure budget. The operators who planned for this are fine. The rest are doing the math.