WoW: Forever takes 250,000 GB of memory to run, and I can’t even joke about Sam Altman being jealous because that’s almost nothing compared to the monolithic demands of AI

MMOs are kinda costly to run, but as it turns out, nowhere near as costly as a datacenter. I was going to spend most of this article joking about how Sam Altman, who doesn’t like that we have RAM, would be frothing at the mouth for that kind of compute power. After a bit of research I am leaving horrified at the sheer industrial heft the AI industry requires.

The numbers were revealed by the official WoW X account, which states that WoW Forever runs on about 3,924 virtual machines, 251,136 GB of memory, and 70,480 CPU cores. To give you an idea of how much server infrastructure that is, our best budget CPU goes for around $110 at the moment, and it has six cores.

Fudge the maths a bit and that’s $1.2 million in cores alone. Which is pricey, don’t get me wrong—though not perhaps for a company that has hundreds of thousands of players paying a sub each month.

Moreover, while it’s funny to imagine Altman simply salivating at the amount of hardware that’s going towards entertaining people, rather than whatever AI does, it turns out the RAM baron himself wouldn’t so much as lift an eyebrow at the amount of tech it takes to run one of the biggest MMO events of the decade.

It’s just actually not that much, at least, not compared to AI. We reported on a $60 million AI rack cluster just last month that had about 1.4 petabytes of memory in it—that’s around 1.4 million GB—and around 4,200 CPUs (each of which likely have a lot of cores, so a lot more than 70,000 cores in general). And yeah, sure, $60 million is costly—but Microsoft spends multiple dozen billions of cash in AI investment each year.

In case you aren’t aware of how much a billion is, $1 billion is enough to buy the aforementioned rack cluster, which let me remind you absolutely dwarfs the WoW: Forever server requirements, 16 and a half times.

In other words, the amount of hardware it takes to run a massive MMO is barely even a dent in the amount that’s being swept into the ever-gluttonous belly of datacenters. I don’t really have a way to end this article that isn’t just putting my face in a pillow and screaming.