LinkedIn Will Not Be Expanding Its Data Center in the Next Year

Unlike many others One of the biggest technology platforms, LinkedIn has decided to spare no effort in developing its AI data center this financial year. Executives at the social networking site tell WIRED that it plans to keep its investments in GPUs stable, and that its computing and storage systems will not remain stable.

The accounting covers LinkedIn’s fiscal year that began last month and ends next June. The company says it was able to avoid spending a lot of money on AI hardware because it found ways to use its existing GPUs twice over the past six months. LinkedIn’s plans may still be possible because AI hardware needs are changing rapidly, but executives say the company is already considering price hikes. memory chips.

“One of the goals we’ve set is to try to keep our roll as flat or as close as possible when we’re sending hungry things to build,” says Erran Berger, LinkedIn’s chief technology officer. “That’s one of the bravest words one can say in today’s world.”

Berger and Raghu Hiremagalur, LinkedIn’s chief technology officer for services, say they want to be smart about their spending and that the new constraints will encourage engineering teams to develop the skills to create many of the new AI products that LinkedIn plans to implement. Berger says he believes the benefits will increase over time, allowing LinkedIn to capitalize on data center expansion as it increases its budgets.

“I would like to reiterate that our large company, say a full year to do this without additional storage and inventory is not small, but it takes a lot of work to get there,” says Hiremagalur.

Companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google are looking for all the money they can get and to unite in an unlikely alliance building, supplying, and operating large data centers equipped with the latest computer chips. The shortage of services and parts has resulted in many projects, and many businesses have reduced the use of other AI tools by customers. But there questions are also growing about whether sustainable investment in AI is sustainable. LinkedIn, with more than 1.3 billion active users, is perhaps the biggest business to publicly address concerns about how it will spend money while downsizing.

“It’s encouraging for the industry,” said Songyee Yoon, managing partner of Principal Venture Partners and a board member at server maker HP. “It shows that AI has moved from experimentation to manufacturing technology. The companies that succeed won’t just be the ones that spend the most on infrastructure.”

Owning It

A few years after Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016, the company tried to move to their parent company’s Azure Cloud service, but it was not financially successful to squeeze the social network into an information center. “Microsoft Azure is growing like crazy, the number of customers is going through the roof, and at the same time we saw a lot of growth on the LinkedIn side,” says Hiremagalur.

In 2022, LinkedIn entered its data centers in Oregon, Texas, and Virginia. The owners gave LinkedIn greater control over all of its technology, positioning itself to meet the realities of the new era. At the same time, LinkedIn began developing AI assistants that would help users write messages, find jobs, and recruit candidates. The work was not cheap. “Each query that comes to our website has increased in value over time,” says Hiremagalur, adding that the amount of data that LinkedIn stores has been doubling in a year. “This is not a stable place to be.”