## The four main challenges involved - from César, the CEO of FluidStack ### 1. Sourcing and buying the hardware from OEMs "The first one will be buying the hardware and sourcing the hardware from from OEMs. There's also usually the dialogue especially with Nvidia because whenever you start needing InfiniBand, you need to speak directly to Mellanox. So it's kind of a dual conversation between Nvidia and the OEM. Then the OEM will typically - you'll procure the hardware from them and they will typically help you design it and do the setup they can also do the manage services afterwards. Meaning, if there's any failure of the cluster while it's running they can hotswap parts, they'll bring in spare parts to be able to do that. So that's the first item, the hardware aspect." ### 2. Colocation - finding the data center with sufficient space, power, and rack density "The second part is the colocation side. So finding the data center with sufficient space, but most importantly, power and rack density because those are really beefy systems. We need like at least 40 kilowatt racks, which is you really start getting into kind of HPC AI specific data centers. So it's not a kind of a general purpose a datacenter that will be able to host these. So that's the second part." ### 3. Financing - who will pay "The third part is the financing element. So who will finance those those deals? Is it the customer who wants to own the hardware. Is it the data center who will turn the capex and buy everything from the OEMs and turn this into opex for the customer. Or is it even the OEM say, Dell or HP who have their own financing branch which will buy the hardware directly from Nvidia and turn it into an Opex model for whoever's paying the bill at the end of the month. That's the third, the financing element." ### 4. (If you're doing this for a customer) Sales - getting the requirements from the customer, closing the deal The fourth one is the sales aspect - getting all the requirements from the customer and closing that sale. Those are the four things that need to work in tandem.