if someone comes up with an alternative way to use a bunch of that infrastructure to make money, I bet they could get a lot of business when the AI bubble pops and suddenly these datacenters are desperate to find a use for themselves
I believe that’s pretty much what happened after the dot-com crash. A lot of fiber was laid during the bubble, it went dormant after the crash, but it was useful afterward as the internet continued growing.
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.
You mean like a crazy ai surveillance program? I take it with a grain of salt but I heard ppl say that’s how they caught Luigi. They have some super secret prototype program “eye in the sky” thing and they just said it was a mc d’s worker as cover.
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.
After .com popped, all the money ran to install fiber data infrastructure - a lot of installs put in more capacity than they projected using for 100 years (glass fibers are cheap, digging trenches for them is expensive). 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.
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.
Yeah, it’s not “nowhere” - but it’s really far from “everywhere” considering we’ve been rolling it out for 25 years now. I think you’re right: glass is cheaper than copper these days, and if they’ve got to repair/replace the copper it’s probably cheaper to just run the glass. They put a line down the main road 1/4 mile from our home last year (suburban area in a 1M pop city), and lots of people who live on that main road have gotten fiber to the home service, but they’re not interested in running the extra 1500 feet to reach us yet. I’d guess in our city of 1M, maybe 200,000 have potential fiber to the home service if they want it, the rest of us are stuck with re-heated cable TV co-ax for our broadband.
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.
They are starting to roll it out in fits and starts in the major metro areas at least, but yeah, 20 years late and nowhere near as universally as promised when our service providers took all those government grants and then didn’t deliver, IMO.
Trillions of dollars worth of compute mining dogecoin
Meanwhile the planet is dying from all the increased emissions from data center usage.
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.
Oh, they totally will. It’ll be another website boom. A lot of the big web presences will be damaged by the bust and hosting costs will fall through the floor. Less barrier to entry for making your little website and some portion of those will become problematicly large due to cheap cost driving bad design and we’ll go through the third or fourth round of this.
Or, for deepest irony, some of the most optimally located datacenters could be converted into steel mills and industrial bakeries.
So you’re saying mining crypto is gonna come back into fashion?
No shit
Everything will be fine as long as they create digital god. Just gotta keep the plates spinning for a few more years… yeah?
One day we’ll read some of these comments and laugh at how shortsighted they were.
Of course we’ll probably have to read them on a manuscript or smeared on a wall with feces because all the world’s resources will be used by the huge datacenters that power our AI overlords
I believe most of the companies are doing it to inflate their share prices.
It’s not even about money or financials that add up on balance sheets. It’s about market share, political power. When you’re Too Big To Fail, balance sheets cease to matter.
So then we’re going to drive down the cost of building & developing infrastructure, right?
Based on the type of AI models IBM has published, they are betting on smaller, specialized models that can run locally or cheaper in a data center. Their strategy seems to be similar to that of thr Chinese, just for different reasons.
I wish i knew more about the guts of LLMs because I keep thinking it must be easier to optimize them than to put data centers into space.
So IBM (PCs are just a passing fad) has a future prediction? Not sure how much weight I should give this.
It’s misleading.
IBM is very much into AI, as a modest, legally trained, economical tool. See: https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite
But this is the CEO saying “We aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid.” It’s shockingly reasonable.
It’s simple, you just use the resources people need and charge them more to keep everything affordable per quarter. Run out there’s plenty of those national parks they’ve been hoarding from us.
Just ask for more tax breaks. poof Problem gone.
Don’t worry consumers will pay for all their poor decisions.
Now guess where that money comes from?
