The Election Day Revolt That Threatens America's AI Boom

schleck8

It's threatening the construction boom, but it's still mostly American companies that are benefiting from an AI buildout, no matter where it happens globally (with the exception of China). Google announced yesterday that they are pouring an additional 15 billion USD into Malaysia for compute. ByteDance is also building there, through DayOne. If you think about it, there aren't many reasons against constructing AI inference capacity outside the US. You tend to have less local resistance and there are plenty of countries with sufficient grid robustness and internet backbones. Malaysia already has many datacenters so this isn't novel. LLMs typically don't have high latency sensitivity since reasoning models came around, so you aren't forced to build them near users, and East Asia is seeing lots of adoption anyways. So all in all, I think US legislators are overestimating their leverage here

tocs3

I am sort of an armchair observer so I am open to others thoughts and observations here. I am wondering what sort of economic impact the AI Boom will have. There is lots of money moving around, the construction will have a positive effect on GDP, and I do not really doubt that AI will have a long term effect on production in the general economy (likely positive). But are the amounts being spent now and the giant tax breaks really worth it?