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rvz an hour ago

Congratulations! You have just realized that the AI data center build out is a total scam, built on both the insurmountable trillions of debt, and the assumption that only GPUs are all we need to continue scaling.

There exist other AI accelerators (TPUs, ASICs) that perfectly exceed the throughput that LLMs need to scale as well. But the true solution is more software optimizations. There's a tiny handful of them but more needs to be discovered so that we can reduce building hundreds of more data centers as the alternatives mature.

As better software becomes more useful for the alternative AI hardware for developers with LLMs running efficiently you then would have more choices of hardware to run your LLMs on rather than just only GPUs.

blovescoffee 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

TPUs and ASICs run in data centers too. Your argument only holds true if there's some satisfied limit to demand for inference. If not, data centers will continue to spring up to host more and more agents. Even if agents were running on hardware and software as efficient as the human brain, its conceivable we want trillions of them running at any given time which would require data center scale.

skyberrys 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I wonder what this looks like in 5 years... Will there be a massive push to repurpose these giant boxes into housing? Will they get turned back into the farm land from where they came? When a data center goes bust, what happens to the parts left behind?

gpm 11 minutes ago | parent [-]

I'd think the infrastructure would tend towards factories, smelters, and so on. Industrial things that have reasonably high power demands, can use the building, and don't care about the lack of windows.

They're typically not built where you want housing, and the buildings are distinctly the wrong shape.

If you can't use the power infrastructure profitably my next thought would be warehousing.

But also... we've seen a pretty continually increasing demand for compute. Even if AI busts a bit (or becomes a bit more efficient) I bet most data centres stay data centres, just less profitable ones.