I was sort of lumping storage and compute costs together as “compute” but compute itself is probably astronomical too.
Even if it was just a CDN, a cdn at that scale streaming that much content simultaneously would require a huge amount of compute just to handle the streaming request traffic.
There’s also the recommendation algorithm which is powered by ai and takes a shit ton of parameters, at that scale that would be a massive computational task in and of itself.
Even video processing they probably send it through a couple Ai pipelines to add subtitles, make sure it’s not porn, check if your discussing topics with high misinformation so it can put that Wikipedia link below the video, etc.
All that plus probably another million other little problems that comes with running a service at that scale.
I was sort of lumping storage and compute costs together as “compute” but compute itself is probably astronomical too.
Even if it was just a CDN, a cdn at that scale streaming that much content simultaneously would require a huge amount of compute just to handle the streaming request traffic.
There’s also the recommendation algorithm which is powered by ai and takes a shit ton of parameters, at that scale that would be a massive computational task in and of itself.
Even video processing they probably send it through a couple Ai pipelines to add subtitles, make sure it’s not porn, check if your discussing topics with high misinformation so it can put that Wikipedia link below the video, etc.
All that plus probably another million other little problems that comes with running a service at that scale.