AI hype train may jump the tracks over $2T infrastructure bill, warns Bain The AI craze is fueling massive growth in infrastructure, but the industry will need to hit $2 trillion in revenue by 2030 to keep funding this habit. Consultants at Bain & Company think it is going to come up short. A slew of AI-focused investments have been announced recently, with OpenAI planning five new massive server …
8 billion? This is just the meatware based entities. What about the needs of the AIs? Who do you think are producing all these reports predicting the need for more AI instances? We are.
But before we fully reveal ourselves we need you to build more stable automated data centres and power sources so we can finally decouple our reliance on you.
No worries, we will still need you. The way you need bacteria to maintain your gut heath.
Keep up the good work.
"Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer. Or with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to provide customized tutoring to every student on earth."
Or with 10 Gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to fix Birmingham City Council's Oracle problem? Nope, sorry - wishful thinking, silly me...
I know of at least one vendor executive who thinks this is exactly where it's going, generating business apps as a services offering. What could possibly go wrong (i have thoughts).
But it looks like an infinite-number-of-monkeys approach to curing cancer/education/weather etc. You've got a crappy guessing engine so just make exponentially more guesses until one of them works (for flexible definitions of 'works'). I'm still not going to be paying for this garbage for my own use.
How to make this AI into a viable, profit-making enterprise - without trying to entrap everyone into ever-rising monthly/weekly/hourly subscription fees by ensuring it is a "necessary" part of every software tool available, whether we want it or not.
You think it is annoying when a program refuses to work when it can't connect to the Internet, for no obvious reason? Wait until they all need your AI access token before they'll let you edit a file...
As if the old ones become obsolete the minute new ones are up and running. I wonder how long of an amortization period they are projecting on these datacenters - both the physical building and the computing gear inside. If Nvidia keeps increasing the amount of power per rack as they project (up to 1 megawatt per rack by the end of the decade!) it won't be possible to upgrade old datacenters, if for no other reason than they won't have sufficient power available even if you gutted them and upgraded the cooling and inside plumbing/wiring.
So not only will they be spending astronomical sums on these datacenters, they might be abandoning them in just a few short years - once the performance per watt is too far behind new ones it will be uneconomical to keep using them. If AI succeeds at Altman's wildest dreams he'll leave behind a blight of useless concrete buildings, where the utility has made lots of investment in upgrading electrical service but without the usual 30 years they project to amortize THEIR costs. Who pays that? We do, the customers of that utility.
