Fiber and railroads don't depreciate after 3 years of use like AI chips.

Fiber and railroads don't need tens of billions of dollars in continuing yearly maintenance expenses to keep them from going stale.

▲

defgeneric 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The "3 years" figure has been repeated endlessly and yet the same H100s are making today roughly what they did in Jan 2024...

▲

horticulturist 20 hours ago | parent [-]

How long does a train track last? Does a fiber optic cable last? Both are greater than 30 years, both will persist (relatively well) without use, and the benefits of scrapping or removing them are minimal. This allowed future companies to take advantage of them. Even if GPUs running at high load last five years, if the data center they are in goes bankrupt (because the AI bubble bursts), it’s likely they’ll be stripped and sold to make way for more productive CPU-based uses and to recover some of the cost of the bankruptcy. The surrounding buildings and infrastructure will have longer use, but it doesn’t translate to a net future benefit with AI.

	▲	tim333 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That reminds me of saying the early Google was doomed because they put all their money into cheap pcs acting as servers - how long do those last? But the enduring value was Google dominating search which was worth billions/trillions, not the heaps of pcs. Same here - the main value is in dominating AI or something like that, not in the stack of hardware.

▲

seizethecheese 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The shorter useful life implies less risk though, since therefore the projections don’t have to play out for very long.

	▲	4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

▲

bigstrat2003 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fiber and railroads also actually accomplish useful things and aren't just a hype vehicle.

▲

KennyBlanken 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Fiber and railroads don't need tens of billions of dollars in continuing yearly maintenance expenses to keep them from going stale.

Congrats, you're as qualified as all the private equity companies that have been piling into railroads!

That's precisely the sort of attitude that got us East Palestine (and others.)

BNSF (for example) spends billions of dollars a year on maintenance. When trains go over rails enough it can mess with the ballast and they have to come through with machines that lift the rail and jiggle the ballast and place the rail back at the correct height. And non-concrete ties have to be replaced every so often. Signals need maintenance. Switches need maintenance. Sensor/scanner shacks need maintenance. Etc.

Railroads have been dramatically cutting back because of pressure from PE, so the estimate is probably low.

>Fiber and railroads don't depreciate after 3 years of use like AI chips.

Are you seriously arguing that infrastructure doesn't depreciate? Tell me you've never done anything other than push bits, without telling me. Fiber gets eaten by backhoes trying to show off to potential mates in the spring, washed out, run over, knocked down by drunk drivers (if on telephone poles, not all of it is buried), has to be relocated because of other works, suffers water intrusion, amplifiers fail, you name it.

	▲	afry1 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Infrastructure depreciates! More slowly and with less expense in relative terms than an LLM model. You get a lot more bang from your buck from a 10 year old set of under-maintained railroad tracks than you do from a 10 year old unmaintained LLM. To compare the depreciation or ongoing maintenance expense of the two as apples to apples is ludicrous. To equate the capital expenditure and long term value of the two as equal is also ridiculous.