WoW: Forever Requires 250,000 GB of Memory to Run—Still Barely a Blip Compared to AI’s Monolithic Demands

(Image credit: Blizzard / Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

MMOs are costly to operate, but as it turns out, nowhere near as costly as a datacenter. The author intended to spend most of the article joking how Sam Altman—who is not fond of the idea that we have RAM—would be frothing at the mouth for that kind of compute power. After a bit of research, however, the writer is left horrified at the sheer industrial heft the AI industry requires.

The figures 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 convey how much server infrastructure that represents, the article notes that its best budget CPU currently costs around $110 and has six cores.

Adjusting the maths a bit, that amounts to $1.2 million in cores alone. Which is pricey, the author clarifies—though perhaps not for a company with hundreds of thousands of players paying a subscription each month.

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Moreover, while it is funny to imagine Altman simply salivating at the amount of hardware going toward 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 required to run one of the biggest MMO events of the decade.

It is just actually not that much, at least not compared to AI. The outlet reported on a $60 million AI rack cluster just last month that contained about 1.4 petabytes of memory—that is around 1.4 million GB—and around 4,200 CPUs (each of which likely has many cores, so considerably more than 70,000 cores in general). And yes, $60 million is costly—but Microsoft spends multiple dozen billions of dollars in AI investment each year.

In case readers are unaware of how much a billion is, $1 billion is enough to buy the aforementioned rack cluster, which the article reminds is absolutely dwarfs the WoW: Forever server requirements, 16 and a half times.

In other words, the hardware required to run a massive MMO barely scratches the surface of what’s being swallowed by the ever-hungry appetite of datacenters. I genuinely can’t think of a way to close this article that doesn’t involve burying my face in a pillow and screaming.

Best MMOs: Most massive
Best strategy games: Number crunching
Best open world games: Unlimited exploration
Best survival games: Live craft love
Best horror games: Fight or flight

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