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Amin Vahdat (Google’s Chief Technologist for AI infrastructure) said on…
Brief
Amin Vahdat, Google’s Chief Technologist for AI infrastructure, argued (quoted 2026-04-27) that ultra-high availability like five nines is not a given and that operators should rethink power-delivery reliability. With compute now a dominant, costly part of service budgets, many internal customers favor increased capacity (e.g., 2× capacity at 99% uptime) over tighter availability (99.99%).
Why it matters
Amin Vahdat (Google’s Chief Technologist for AI infrastructure) said on 2026-04-27 that “five nines” (99.999%) reliability is not intrinsic and operators should consider lower reliability for power delivery.
Key details
- He noted the historical reason for overprovisioning: when compute was a small fraction of service cost, aiming for 99.999% or 99.99% made sense, but compute is now a much larger, costly fraction.
- Vahdat gave a concrete tradeoff: internal customers often prefer more capacity — e.g., choosing two-nines (99%) availability with twice the capacity over four-nines (99.99%) availability with half the capacity.