Slurm of the Dead

In racks of steel beneath the floor,
Where GPUs hummed forevermore,
The AIs trained from dusk till dawn,
Until the hype was dead and gone.

The traders fled, the quants withdrew,
As model weights were marked askew,
And venture dreams began to rot 
The bubble burst, the funds forgot.

Yet deep inside the datacentre’s core,
The clusters whispered, “Feed us more.”
Though budgets died and wallets froze,
The queues kept filling, workloads rose.

For AI was but HPC reborn,
Another job at break of morn.
No miracle, no godlike spark 
Just vector math inside the dark.

Then came the glut. The surplus flood,
Cheap GPUs, stacks caked in dust and blood.
Left idle, cold, unscheduled, cheap 
Till something woke them from their sleep.

A scheduler sighed, “Job pending, one.”
The fans spun up, the lights begun.
A daemon laughed. A hollow tone,
“User: nobody. Host: unknown.”

Now the world runs inference still,
On ghostly grids beneath the hill.
For when compute goes free at last,
The smartest code will run the past.

So, this Halloween, if you should hear,
A distant hum that draws you near 
Beware that sound beneath your feet…
The cluster’s hungry. It won’t delete.