IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending trillions on AI data centers will pay off at today's infrastructure costs

I hope not but it probably will.

The last one standing will probably get a bailout by corporate Democrats and every Republican.

For the vast majority of these companies, probably not.

If the company is AI-only, then if/when the bubble bursts, I suspect it'll go under too. Only the biggest players will survive that, like OpenAI, since so many other services call out to their API.

Companies that can pivot back to core markets will be fine, Google, Microsoft. Shovel sellers will mostly be okay too. What that'll look like for them is a period of huge overvaluation and then a return to sanity, you can see similar histories if you look at the stock price of still extant dotcom bubble companies.

And then the hype will be over, there will be a huge crater left in GDP, retirement accounts, and the larger economy, but some "AI" technology will remain — stuff that is actually useful, like transcription, natural speech, noise removal, automated rotoscoping. But the fantasy of replacing information workers and artists will not come to pass, though they probably won't differentiate for the next several years, as the jobs market is decimated all the same by speculation hangover.

Worked for the US after WWII.

Well... for a while at least.

It’s the same thing. Either way, they get free government money and lots of passive income because they don’t actually have to make anything or do anything to make money.

In a small, anecdotal way, I can say with confidence that the level of fiber trenching that happened (in a major metro area) from late 1999 through 2002 was on a whole other level.

Even if that doesn't exist yet in the USA, it's definitely in the UK with all their CCTV stuff.

And we know US law enforcement can use things like Ring doorbells.

That's just a conspiracy theory. Luigi is clearly a different person from the images of the shooter.

The promise of “fiber to the home” is still mostly unrealized, but those trunk lines are out there with oodles of “dark fiber” ready to carry data… someday.

Counterintuitively, I'm seeing "fiber to the home" deployed more in rural an exurb areas. My guess this is because its lower density meaning installing and maintaining copper repeaters becomes more expensive than laying long distance, low maintenance, fiber. Additionally its easier to obtain permits because there is far less existing infrastructure to interfere with right of way and critical services.

We got fiber to the home in our exurb about 4 years ago here in the USA. Its really cheap too. 500Mb/s is $75, 1Gb/s $100, and 5Gb/s I think is $200 per month.

The promise of "fiber to the home" is still mostly unrealized

Really? The US is really unsophisticated in certain key areas that you wouldn't expect.

Datacenters aren't helping, but they're like 3-4% of emissions. It's still manufacturing plastic crap and shipping across the ocean with bunker fuel burn causing 60% of it.

But yeah, increased energy usage isn't helping.

For the same reasons. The old rules still work, most of the gold in tech industry is in tall RnD later paid off by scaling indefinitely. Things different from that are either intentionally promoted to inflate a bubble, or popular as a result of wishful thinking where that industry will change in favor of the same curve as with oil and gas. The latter just won't happen.

Data is analogous to oil and gas here. But more like urine in ancient Rome than like something dug up from the ground.

But there's still interest in making some protections and barriers to collection of said data, because otherwise those collecting it are interested to immediately use it for only their own good and not even of other fish in the pond.

Who's consulting IBM to build out an AI platform?