More and more mainstream analysts are identifying the coming AI crash, which is a good indication that it will happen soon.
So, what happens to all the data centers? They are already built but probably very expensive to maintain. Will many of them just be abandoned? Bought up by cloud computing companies? Scammers? Crypto miners? Can they be parted out and sold off piecemeal?
Will they be put to some productive use, or just become massive e-waste sites left to the locals to deal with?
They will just turn all the empty space inside into detention centers and keep all of us locked up.
If they’re already operational when that happens, likely sold off to cloud hyper scalers on the cheap. That or they’ll be turned into warehouses.
Nothing half done will just be abandoned and the land sold.
All this hardware is essentially worthless other than AI
AI isn’t going away, there may be some consolidation of providers and right sizing of costs but AI is here to stay. Too many big companies have invested too much for it to fail.
The operating costs of AI are prohibitively expensive even by the standards of US military budgets, and they are not the utility we were promised. Companies were told they could replace their entire workforce with AI and not only is that not true but now the subscription costs are going up.
It doesn’t matter how much consolidating you do the product still isn’t compelling and it’s still expensive as hell to operate.
Anthropic is expected to post a profit next quarter, it may prohibitively expensive to run but that doesn’t mean it can’t be profitable. But who knows, maybe they won’t.
I read somewhere that for every $1 they’re taking in in cash they’re spending $100 in operating costs. If they charge the amount of money they would need to charge in order to actually have net income they wouldn’t have any customers.
We’ll see if they post a profit or not but if they do then your source was probably an AI hallucination.
I’m not saying changes aren’t coming, if they can’t make a profit off it then they’ll need to adapt or die. So it will either get more expensive or more efficient, but I don’t believe the bubble will burst and there will suddenly be a fire sale on cheap data centres or their hardware.
The issue is really the use cases for AI have been way overblown. The AI companies sold it as an employee replacer. “It’ll cost pennies on the dollar, have better accuracy, and doesn’t need time off!” That’s not actually what it is though. Companies are coming to terms with AI being more expensive, less accurate, and dumb.
A piece of software I use at work is a great example and they barely oversold the capabilities. The software has a built in AI assistant which is pretty good at pointing you in the right direction to get the result you want. Then some genius realized it could also pull report data, so they removed some metric options from the reports and now I have to spend significantly longer prompting the AI to pull the metrics I want in a usable format. This is also far more computing power. So they decided to let you link other AI agents to their software so you could use another bigger model for “better results” (they don’t want to pay for all that AI themselves). Nobody bit, nobody linked to another AI because nobody wants to pay more. They’re quietly adding those metrics back to the reports now.
They said that about so many other things in the past
Like?
- fully CGI movies
- coal mines
- British Steel
- American Steel
- Enron
But we still have CGI movies, we still have coal mining companies, and we still have steel manufacturing companies. AI companies may fail, but the AI industry will continue, which was my point.
Aye, and there’s still slavery too.
But there’s far far far far far far far far far far less of it than before the “too big to fail” bubble burst.
And what’s left of it is niche and specialist, such as Prison.
Sure, let’s split hairs.
Avatar: Fire and Ash
That’s not full CGI? There’s live action in it.
As in everything in the movie being CGI
You willingly watched that movie? Wild
When its really AI and turns into something mature and clearly useful I will use it. Until they come up with real AI I will continue to point and laugh.
There’s no AI crash coming. It’s pure copium.
Why has the tech become affordable and useful all of a sudden?
It’s extremely useful and is affordable enough for people who can actually make use of it.
So all these companies that replace all their employees with AI and then immediately need the human’s back. They’re just doing it wrong are they?
I wouldn’t mind AI if it actually worked as advertised. If I could run a pure AI company from my home office that would be fabulous thing. The thing is it doesn’t work, you can’t do that.
Have you read the report about where they tried to get an AI to independently run a vending machine, it couldn’t even cope with that.
Yes, they are doing it wrong. AI is a tool for employees to use. It’s not an employee.
You don’t get AI to independently run a business, and anyone stupid enough to think you can or should do that should be nowhere near AI.
Apparently the US government is looking to give a massive bailout under the guise of “public partnership” so the public will pay for them and then corporations will get to use them and not pay us more than likely. They’ll be put to use, we’ll pay for them to take our jobs. It’s really the best situation possible…
/Wrist
This is the most accurate assessment of the situation I have heard thus far.
2008 with hardware.
Hardware that dies in 5 years. At least the houses are still around assuming they didn’t get wiped out with those fires
American houses are built with cardboard paper, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve been destroyed by now.
I hate that this is actually pretty accurate, depending on which contractor you go with.
Whole neighborhoods were built during the housing bubble that had contaminated drywall (gypsum board) with sulfate VOCs that had to be gutted or torn down completely.
Survielllance centers for all the data being stolen off your smartphone and flock cameras.
If anyone thinks I’m wrong, they’re completely blind to what’s going on and their future plan.
If anyone thinks I’m wrong, they’re completely blind to what’s going on and their future plan.
But the hallucination problem means that everyone will end up with a meaningless list of AI hallucinated “prior offenses” that could be used to arrest, detain and disappear literally anyone, based on mismatched unaudited surveillance footage of completely different people.
I’m thankful that no powerful persons today want a world where they can do that to anyone they find inconvenient.
It would be genuinely alarming if we had any total assholes out there with wealth or power or both.
Mmhm very alarming. Good thing we are safe.
What the LLMs can do reasonably well though is determine the political leanings of people’s typed messages, so it can sort people into lists of potential dissidents based on their risk to the state, then they can have the human agents do the framing for arrest. The AI is probably terrible at doing that consistently too, but they don’t have the personnel to do it by hand and the false positives still work to instill the fear of it.
you dropped this, /s
someone might mistake you for a brain damaged psych patient without it.
do not insult my patients
patents?
Survielllance centers for all the data being stolen off your smartphone and flock cameras.
Yes, and other sources. That’s my theory as to why most of them are being built in the first place, regardless of AI.
I dont believe its a theory. Its absolute fact. Why else would they be requiring cameras in all cars next year, and putting flock cameras all over every city? That surveillance data needs to be stored and sorted through. This is the real reason for the massive push of data centers and bribery of politicians.
Yes, they’ve been wanting to do it for many years, even before 9/11 but especially after (remember “Total Information Awareness”?–back then the backlash stopped them, but now the populace has been mostly tamed and made compliant). So now with AI/LLM they have not only the perfect cover to build the datacenters but also the means to process all that data–never mind hallucinations, they’re fine with that too.
We can only hope for an Anonymous level sabotage group.
Do yoy have any proof for that or is that just what you think is going to happen?
One thing not mentioned here: Hardware has an expiration date. As hardware improves and becomes more performant, with reduced power consumption and heat generation, older hardware loses its value (I’ve got free servers and switches this way).
AI data centers have been built anticipating a demand that won’t happen, therefore they are in a market already over saturated, dominated by few and just selling allocation won’t let them cover costs if they are supposed to compete against the big 5.
I would say that in EU or few other countries where they care about data locality that could help, but chances are some providers won’t get paid, some people will lose their jobs, and taxpayers will give a bailout to the wrong people.
It’s actually worse. The die shinks that help increase speed and density decrease durability. You can’t run lightning between walls a few atoms thick forever.
Not sure about the buildings themselves, but I’m pretty confident at least their contents will flood the secondhand market with cheap secondhand gear. I won’t say the crypto bubble has burst, but a lot of the mining rigs are being parted out and sold fairly cheap, and one specific crypto mining board has become popular as a DIY gaming system. (Currently doing a BC-250 “DIY SteamMachine” build myself).
As for the buildings, maybe we’ll see some creative uses like indoor farms or something. Or, perhaps, it’ll just be a mundane “AI datacenter becomes a generic data center”.
I’d guess they’d be repurposed into business centers or office space like we’ve seen with old malls, but malls were usually in populated areas where datacenters aren’t.
It’s kinda hard to reuse datacenter hardware for home use. Many connectors are different, form factors too. Not to mention the noise, in servers noise is about the last priority.
Selfhosting enthusiasts will get great deals, but I doubt it will become mainstream.
If my gaming PC dose not sound like a jet taking off, I’m not satisfied.
the bigger problem is, that AI optimized GPUs have terrible gaming performance
My stupid Ai side project would be fast as fuck though.
Based on where brick and mortar retail is right now (and assuming e-commerce continues to thrive), there won’t be much conversion of the data centers into anything useful due to how many buildings are already sitting idle. Maybe some will become distribution centers. But most will probably sit dormant and slowly crumble into disrepair.
They have great electrical connections. Fill them with batteries (not spicy lithium ones) and you have loads of local energy storage.
Lots of the difficulties with green projects right now is the electrical hook up, so they have all done the hard work!
Good point!
Crypto equipment has always cycled out to the market cheaply, it’s just usually not super useful second hand.
The equipment that AI data centers use isn’t really usable as consumer hardware, though.
It’s like the ASIC rigs used for Bitcoin mining, not the GPU rigs.
I’m pretty confident at least their contents will flood the secondhand market with cheap secondhand gear.
What market? Certainly not the consumer hardware market…?
My Need -> eBay -> [server part search term] -> Multiple inexpensive listings with large quantities available -> Buy -> My Need Met
Replace “server part search term” with full rack servers, switches, SFP+ modules, RAM, power supplies, pulled HDDs/SSDs, and/or any other part I’ve bought used that was a corporate/data center pull.
I don’t…none of that answered my question?
“Homelab nerds” are a market unto ourselves. We get most if not all of our gear secondhand from eBay or similar, and those storefronts on ebay are run by electronics recycling companies that get their inventory from data centers or corporate offices when they shut down or do hardware refreshes.
Ohhh I see.
As for the buildings, maybe we’ll see some creative uses like indoor farms or something.
Nope, though I admire your optimism. They’ll get repurposed into concentration camps.
A golden age for laser tag arenas
I would prefer a roller rink revival myself, but laser tag is fun too.
Ok hear me out: Roller laser tag!
grils! grils! there’s plenty of floorspace for both!
Indoor airsoft/paintball too, provided it’s purged of MAGA cosplayers
Get ready for the 2040 internet trend “spending the night in an abandoned data center”
Horror movie idea: The Rackrooms
The Racks
Has a good double entendre for horror
Spirit Halloween gonna have some massive sales.
The ones being built or planned to be built will have to be sold off.
Probably not abadndoned, but land owner changing several hands in what is essentially someone buying a vacant lot. Maybe a handful will reuse any existing building already made, but most will be used for something new.
The existing ones will start their fight to the lowest market price which will probably cause many to either sell to a different cloud provider or change hardware to something more profitable.
None of the electronic hardware will go to waste because there will always be a demand for it, even if they sell it off at a loss. But any permanent fixtures like industrial cabling, ventilation, piping, etc probably will be wasted.
There’s still no guarantee on whether it’ll implode or just slowly deflate though. The natural assumption would be that the post IPO pricing will completely wreck sales and value, but they could easily move to an enterprise vendor lock scenario where they can charge whatever they want due to tech stack deals like how MSFT runs teams.
Remember, they’ll do anything in their power to keep the pumping going, even if it involves tax bailouts.
Hire funny wood it be if they tried to get a tax bail out and Trump approved it but he actually can’t do it since there’s no money left to bail them out
Cheap datacenters for sale to the surviving AI companies. It’s not like all things AI will disappear just because the bubble pops.
Hopefully the used storage would flood the market and drive down prices.
I think thats wishful thinking. I don’t think that most of what goes in a modern datacenter has much use outside of a datacenter.
Nah, they’re gonna try to recoup their loss. Ram, processors, and graphics cards have value outside of a data center. As long as there is money to be made, the hardware will be sold
The GPUs they’re using don’t have video output, take the energy of a furnace and are fanless (rely on the high air flow of a very noisy server rack). And they’re not using a standard pcie connector.
The CPUs are the same, big like a smartphone, require a massive cooler and a massive motherboard
Motherboards are difficult to repurpose as they require two massive processors
RAM is registered ecc and thanks to Intel almost no consumer hardware supports that.
SSDs maybe we can buy a cheap pcie adapter on AliExpress, but the data lines on a consumer processor are not too many so you can realistically put 1-2 in your PC, not dozens like the old SAS server drives. And also they’re toasty as they assume the case is giving high air flow
Learned something today. We are truly in the darkest timeline
