Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 13 hours ago
One thing we saw with the dot-com bust is how certain individuals were able to cash in on the failures, e.g., low cost hardware, domain names, etc. (NB. prices may exceed $2)
Perhaps people are already thinking about they can cash in on the floor space and HVAC systems that will be left in the wake of failed "AI" hype
"Loft for rent, 50,000 sq ft in a new datacenter, roof access, superb wiring and air conditioning, direct access to fiber backbone."
In TX? In Russian blogosphere it is a standard staple that Trump is rushing Ukrainian peace deal to be able to move on to the set of mega-projects with Russia - oil/gas in Arctic and data centers in Russian North-West where electricity and cooling is plentiful and cheap.
actually it is more of the opposition's narrative, probably a way to explain such a pro-Russian position of Trump.
I think any such data center project is doomed to ultimately fail, and any serious investment will be for me a sign of the bubble peak exuberance and irrationality.
From the article:
""It's my view that there's no way you're going to get a return on that, because $8 trillion of capex means you need roughly $800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest," he said."
Right, THEY can't, but cloud providers potentially can. And there are probably other uses for everything not GPU/TPU for the Google's of the world. They are out way less than IBM which cannot monetize the space or build data centers efficiently like AWS and Google.
The dotcom bust killed companies, not the Internet. AI will be no different. Most players won’t make it, but the tech will endure and expand.
Or endure and contract.
The key difference between AI and the initial growth of the web is that the more use cases to which people applied the web, the more people wanted of it. AI is the opposite - people love LLM-based chatbots. But it is being pushed into many other use cases where it just doesn't work as well. Or works well, but people don't want AI-generated deliverables. Or leaders are trying to push non-deterministic products into deterministic processes. Or tech folks are jumping through massive hoops to get the results they want because without doing so, it just doesn't work.
Basically, if a product manager kept pushing features the way AI is being pushed -- without PMF, without profit -- that PM would be fired.
This probably all sounds anti-AI, but it is not. I believe AI has a place in our industry. But it needs to be applied correctly, where it does well. Those use cases will not be universal, so I repeat my initial prediction. It will endure and contract.
The difference is that the Internet was actually useful technology, whereas AI is not (so far at least).
I think you're exaggerating a little, but aren't entirely wrong. The Internet has completely changed daily life for most of humanity. AI can mean a lot of things, but a lot of it is blown way out of proportion. I find LLMs useful to help me rephrase a sentence or explain some kind of topic, but it pales in comparison to email and web browsers, YouTube, and things like blogs.
Holy cow. I have 96GB of DDR5 I bought at start of year for a machine which never materialized. Might have to flip it.
For a while with bitcoin, it seemed GPU investing was almost a thing.
I just checked, the kit I bought in February was $270, today it is showing up for $1070. Woof. Now I have to decide if I should keep it on the off chance I do get around to that machine or dump it while the getting is good. Then again, who wants to buy RAM of unknown provenance unless they themselves are looking to scam the seller.
Cheap compute would be a boon for science research.
The GPUs, sure. The mainboards and CPUs can be used in clusters for general-purpose computing, which is still more prevalent in most scientific research as far as I am aware. My alma mater has a several-thousand-core cluster that any student can request time on as long as they have reason to do so, and it's all CPU compute. Getting non-CS majors to write GPU code is unlikely in that scenario.
Why do you believe it will fail? Because some companies will not be profitable?
It wasn't an 'it' it was a 'some'. Some of these companies that are investing massively in data centers will fail.
Right now essentially none have 'failed' in the sense of 'bankrupt with no recovery' (Chapter 7). They haven't run out of runway yet, and the equity markets are still so eager, even a bad proposition that includes the word 'AI!' is likely to be able to cut some sort of deal for more funds.
But that won't last. Some companies will fail. Probably sufficient failures that the companies that are successful won't be able to meaningfully counteract the bursts of sudden supply of AI related gear.
That's all the comment you are replying to is implying.
If the entire world economy starts to depend on those companies, they would pay off with "startup level" ROI. And by "startup level" I mean the amounts bullish people say startups funds can pay (10 to 100), not a bootstrapped unicorn.
the constant cost of people and power won't make it all that much cheaper than current prices to put a server into someone's else rack.
>cash in on the floor space and HVAC systems that will be left in the wake of failed "AI" hype
I'd worry surveillance companies might.
I'm looking forward to buying my own slightly used 5 million square ft data centre in Texas for $1