Will the AI data centre boom become a $9T bust?

nick49488171

No probably not

woeirua

Better hope not. If the AI bubble pops it’s going to make the dotcom bubble look like a tiny divot in the road.

mattas

https://archive.is/ad64x

VladVladikoff

I replaced a $22/hr worker entirely with AI. And it costs me about $0.18/hr instead. The AI does a better job, is more reliable and consistent. The human was constantly behind schedule, made frequent mistakes, and also humans get sick, or call off work for other reasons. So yes, AI is a bubble, but this bubble has generated value, it’s not at all like 2008.

Melatonic

If it does there is gonna be a lot of cheap second hand hardware out there for those who want to build something cool

marcosdumay

Yeah... The AI industry will die on the shadow of the Iran war, and there will be forever some people claiming that it was healthy all around and would lead to world-change if the rest of the economy didn't blow.

monodeldiablo

It's not really even a question. It's an obvious boondoggle. The forecasted net new energy requirements for the AI buildout over the next couple of years are roughly equivalent to all of Western Europe's power demand today. That's absurd. It's a physical impossibility to bring that much power online that quickly. And the cost to get even close would make AI more expensive than just hiring knowledge workers to do the same tasks. And it's all predicated on a tower of wobbly or broken assumptions -- chief among them that increasing the size of these models yields better performance. We're going to look back on this era and wonder why anybody took any of the outrageous claims of tech CEOs seriously.

atleastoptimal

People really really don’t understand the implications of AGI. Whether or not you believe we will reach it in a fee years, we are certainly wayy closer today than we were even two years ago. The possibility of genuine AGI obliterates all the financial or energy related worries, they pale in comparison to the ultimate impact of such a technology. However, yes, if you believe AGI is not possible or won’t arrive in the coming decade then all the data center buildup seems foolish.

adrianwaj

In other news: "HUT 8 Builds Flex Data Centers For AI, Bitcoin" https://catenaa.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/hut-8-builds-fl... And they'll also do "high-performance computing." Yet, I think Sun's early 2000's vision "the network is the computer" is finally coming and these data centers will all end up becoming multi-use. Want access to apps running with 128GB of memory? Fine.. it'll just be on a thin-client with a data-center powering it (and everything else it does.) It's not a bad model. As I've mentioned previously, on the client-side I think will be a new era of all-in-one modular SBCs (medium clients.) These can become thin-clients for really beefy applications too that don't have to be "local-first" and can thus be "cloud enabled." It'd also be interesting to see crypto become more dynamic. Like making it super easy to issue a token for say an upcoming event, or better yet, a new invention looking for early adopters and supporters like Rodin Coils. The big data centers on the backend can make it secure. Just speculating. So the "big iron" compute won't ever be wasted, just repurposed dynamically. All these mad-scientist inventions will come from unemployed geniuses and tin-foil hatters, some of whom may actually be right. Let's see if they can find a way to vastly speed up radioactive decay with lasers, but, letting the bankers be fine with it all.

augstein

Imo most AI compute will happen on-device in the near future.