Unlike many other big tech platforms, LinkedIn has decided it won’t spend aggressively on expanding its AI data centers this fiscal year. Executives at the professional social network tell WIRED that it plans to keep its investment in GPUs steady, and its compute and storage footprint is also remaining flat.

The spending calculations apply to LinkedIn’s fiscal year that began last month and ends next June. The company says it was able to avoid spending big on AI hardware because it found ways to use its existing GPUs twice as efficiently over the past six months. LinkedIn’s plan could still unravel because the hardware demands of AI are shifting rapidly, but executives say the company has already taken into account surging prices for memory chips.

“One of the goals we've set is to try to basically keep our compute footprint flat or as close to flat as possible while shipping more compute-hungry things to production,” says Erran Berger, LinkedIn’s chief technology officer for engineering. “That’s a pretty bold statement to make in today's world.”

Berger and Raghu Hiremagalur, LinkedIn’s chief technology officer for infrastructure, say they want to be prudent about spending and that the new constraints will motivate engineering teams to get more creative when developing the many new generative AI features LinkedIn is planning to launch. Berger says he believes the efficiency gains could compound over time, enabling LinkedIn to get more out of data center expansions when it eventually increases its budgets again.

“I really want to double underscore that for a company of our scale, to say a full year we're going to do this with no incremental storage and compute is no small feat, but it's taken a ton of work to get there,” Hiremagalur says.

Companies such as OpenAI, Meta, and Google are scrounging up all the money they can find and coupling up in unexpected partnerships to construct, furnish, and operate massive data centers filled with the newest computer chips. Labor and parts shortages have held up many projects, and many businesses have had to limit customer usage of some AI tools. But there are also growing questions about whether the relentless investment in AI is sustainable. LinkedIn, with more than 1.3 billion users, is perhaps the largest business yet to publicly address spending concerns by bucking the building boom.

“It is encouraging for the industry,” says Songyee Yoon, managing partner of Principal Venture Partners and a board member at the server maker HP. “It suggests AI is beginning to move from experimentation into production discipline. The companies that win will not simply be the ones that spend the most on infrastructure.”

Owning It

A few years after Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016, the company tried moving to its parent company’s Azure cloud service, but it didn’t make economic sense to squeeze the giant social network into general-purpose data centers. “Microsoft Azure was growing like crazy, the level of customer demand was through the roof, and at the same time we saw skyrocketing growth on the LinkedIn side,” Hiremagalur says.

In 2022, LinkedIn went all-in on its own data centers in Oregon, Texas, and Virginia. The ownership gave LinkedIn significant control over every detail of its technology, setting itself up well to meet the realities of a new era. Around the same time, LinkedIn began developing AI-based assistants that could help users write messages, find jobs, and recruit candidates. The endeavor wasn’t cheap. “Every query that's coming to our site has increased in cost over time,” Hiremagalur says, adding that the amount of data LinkedIn stored was doubling annually. “That is not a sustainable place to be.”

LinkedIn moved to optimize its data center usage at every stage of the AI pipeline, from training models to serving them in response to user queries. Hiremagalur’s team developed measurement tools to understand how much compute and storage individual teams were using. It then set up a system to allocate projects to the computers in its data centers more efficiently so that they sat idle less often. “Our allocation efficiency and utilization of GPUs on the training side is the best that I have seen,” Hiremagalur says, describing usage at north of 95 percent.

LinkedIn also used techniques such as distillation to train smaller AI models from larger ones. For its job recommendation tools, a single model learned from two larger models to both identify relevant openings and predict which users were most likely to click on them. While the smaller model is more affordable to operate, Berger says it doesn't sacrifice on quality. “People are finding and discovering jobs that they were not successfully finding before, because the model is doing a really good job of understanding” their desires, he says.

The model used to select which posts to show users on their newsfeeds also was expensive to operate initially, but LinkedIn found a way to get it to run in “a reasonably cost-effective way,” Berger says. He says that the company made dozens of improvements, such as streamlining model training, reusing information from earlier recommendations, and better balancing workloads between CPUs and GPUs.

LinkedIn even reworked some of the foundational software on Nvidia processors to make them capable of handling tasks larger than they were designed for. It also rejiggered other software to run tasks on CPUs instead of Nvidia GPUs, which are pricier, more difficult to procure, and consume greater amounts of electricity. Altogether, LinkedIn estimates its efficiency work has saved about $24 million over the past 12 months, or the equivalent of roughly 1,100 GPUs running around the clock for a year.

The LinkedIn executives acknowledge that the savings don’t amount to much for a company that has $18 billion in annual sales. But Hiremagalur says “craft” matters too, and so does “the agility” created by freeing up resources. Engineers can take on their next project sooner and integrate more AI capabilities without having to increase LinkedIn’s computing footprint.

Berger contends that LinkedIn has been able to deliver better job and candidate results while still keeping a lid on costs and generating a financial return for Microsoft. “We should be able to deliver better quality by deploying larger models, doing deeper inference, and doing it for cheaper if we can,” he says.

Despite keeping spending flat, LinkedIn’s data centers aren’t going stale. The company has committed to purchasing new servers that will enable it to keep upgrading its machines as they age out or break down over the coming months. But the company was able to lock in some savings by buying ahead. “The cost of all of this hardware has just gone through the roof,” Hiremagalur says, noting some servers have jumped three-fold in price in the past few months. “It's just nuts.”

LinkedIn’s efficiency drive is part of a broader trend sometimes referred to as “tokenomics”—more deeply analyzing the cost of using generative AI tools. “Enterprises are evolving from a buy-more era to a do-more era,” says Chirag Dekate, who helps businesses think through their AI cloud strategies for the consultancy Gartner. “Until now, the mantra was, buy more to save more. But buy more only increases costs.”

Dekate says he has recently seen smaller businesses that don’t have as much control over their infrastructure as LinkedIn find their own ways to shed costs. They have purged unused software and shed employees, bought data center space from so-called “neoclouds” that can be more affordable than traditional providers, and adopted the lowest-cost AI models possible for any given project.

He worries somewhat that LinkedIn and others could run into a wall if they introduce too many financial constraints, because the need for greater amounts of compute and storage are inevitable. “At some point, something has to give,” Dekate says. “Either you have to compromise on your AI ambitions, or you have to compromise on your mandates to freeze IT spend.”

LinkedIn isn’t swearing off future data center growth. But it is changing how it allocates infrastructure. There’s no more coming up with “a wild ass guess” about how much computing resources teams expect to use in the coming year, Hiremagalur says. But LinkedIn has chosen “to embrace the chaos” and take things quarter by quarter while keeping its eye on long-term return on investment, says Berger. Maybe the flattened spending won’t last as long as planned.