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

The upcoming WoW: Forever event will run on substantial server infrastructure, but its requirements are small compared with those of AI data centres. The figures put the scale of modern AI investment into perspective, even alongside a major online game.

According to WoW’s official X account, the event uses about 3,924 virtual machines, 251,136 GB of memory and 70,480 CPU cores. The article estimates the cores alone would cost around $1.2 million using a budget processor as a rough comparison. By contrast, a recently reported $60 million AI rack cluster had about 1.4 million GB of memory and 4,200 CPUs, while Microsoft spends tens of billions of dollars on AI investment each year.