Alibaba Cloud can’t deploy servers fast enough to satisfy demand for AI

China’s Alibaba Cloud can’t deploy servers fast enough to keep up with demand for AI, so is rationing access to GPUs so that customers who use all of its services enjoy priority access. Speaking on Alibaba Group’s Q2 earnings call, CEO Yongming Wu said “demand for AI is accelerating” and also deepening due to demand “from all …

[PinchOfSalt]

Demand does not mean there's no bubble

Just because infrastructure is in high demand does not equate to a sustainable business model.

If the folks above you are all scrambling to add users and are eating the loses between what customers will pay and the cost of their underpinning services, you're still going to hit crunch point fairly soon.

LLM based offerings are useful. They're great at a few use cases.

But they're a long way from being worth paying vast sums for, which is what would need to happen for the entire stack to be sustainable.

[MachDiamond]

Will solve itself

Perhaps Alibaba can't scale up fast enough, but they will find they scale down (to zero) sharpishly when the bottom falls out.

All of these companies may have a year before investors give up, companies fail and the few that have something that truly has potential will all start merging.

I was out driving the side roads yesterday and solar panels are being carpet bombed onto the landscape. It's a desert around here so the land has limited uses with solar being a pretty good one, nice and flat, lots of sunny days and cheap. I'm going to have to check again on CCTV repair work. Not glamorous, but it might pay well enough in my semi-retirement. It's sorta like being the robot oiler, but I expect it will be a lot of driving around to do a few minutes of actual work and off to the next one. Prof Reg Chronotis had the right idea.