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?
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.
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.
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.
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
They will just turn all the empty space inside into detention centers and keep all of us locked up.
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
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
Cheap datacenters for sale to the surviving AI companies. It’s not like all things AI will disappear just because the bubble pops.
In past crypto busts, Nvidia bought used datacenter GPUs and threw them away, to keep prices of new cards high.
They will undoubtedly do this again. Probably AMD/Intel too.
And “FOMO” style crypto mining sites were just abandoned or repurposed AFAIK.
But honestly, I don’t know what will happen now. Especially to the “quick and dirty” sites like Meta’s server tents, all the supposedly temporary evaporative cooling/gas generators and such.
Used server GPUs are still pretty good processors for all sorts of things. I would guess that Nvidia pivots towards robotics and“business virtual reality,” kinda like they’re already pivoting towards more utilitarian LLMs with the Nemotron releases, so maybe the surviving GPUs will get used for that.
Do these datacenters even exist or are they just plans on paper?
My impression is we aren’t axtually building anywhere near what these investors are investing in.
Will there even be anything to repurpose or scrap on the other side?
I am not so sure.
Oracle is building one of there several plans and even that one is gonna be years behind schedule. The rest are hardly more than a slab of concrete right now. So forget parting out computer hardware, they barely even have more than a couple of new buildings to sell off and so much debt that cannot possibly be paid because it depends on openAI suddenly having astronomical increases in revenue to even finish the existing plans.
Other players might be further ahead but I suspect the biggest gain for the gaming hardware market will simply be the cancelation of supposed contracts to buy up things like RAM and the drying up of money to buy AI-specific GPUs, forcing NV to actually care a tiny bit about the gaming segment again.
The one about 30 minutes from me most certainly exists. The one 15 minutes away they are building at this moment is just as real. The noise is ruining everything. The air is smoggy. It’s not just an interweb myth or something. These things are a blight on the places they appear in DC area for reference.
mainstream analysts are identifying the coming AI crash
If so many people /experts are expecting a crash, the crash chances will be more and more included in the price. So far, I don’t see that at all.
They tried to make pension funds into bag holders before those IPOs got blocked. I think the desperation surrounding getting those stocks added in 5 days should be a better indication than price.
Where did you read that the IPOs got blocked?
They decided not to change their rules to allow these unhealthy stocks in. They have to do the full process instead of skipping the line to make pensioners into bag holders as opposed to Altman and friends.
They’re not blocked but they’re never going to be healthy enough to be added before they implode.
If I smother OpenAI to death by denying them oxygen for 5 minutes did I “block” the entry of air into their lungs, or did they just not breathe for 5 minutes?
The new pan is to just push to retail using hype and social media manipulation.
Well at least that’ll only wipe out half of my pension instead of all of it
As soon as they can be force listed on every index the will take the rest!
I think they will leverage what money they raise via stocks sales to continue the buildout of the mainframe surveillance state.
They’ll try. Once this bubble pops there literally isnt enough money for the US to print their way out of it. It’ll be a default on US treasuries since they got all the blood they’re going to get out of the working class the last 3 times they printed infinite money. I think we’re soon about to meet that can multiple generations of corrupt politicians and bankers have been kicking down the road.
That has not been true of any historic financial bubble. Almost ALL of them have been clearly identified in advance. However, the nature of financial bubbles is that there is lots of money to be made leading up to the burst.
Please learn a little history.
You’re not wrong, but ending with “please learn a little history” is pretty condescending.
You know, that’s fair enough. But honestly people confidently spreading ridiculous misinformation can set me off a bit.
Sharing an argument is “misinformation” nowadays, but writing “the coming AI crash” (as if that’s a fact) without posting a single source about those “more and more” analysis…? You are a rage-baiting troll.
That has not been true of any historic financial bubble. Almost ALL of them have been clearly identified in advance.
Clearly identified by who? Maybe be a few. For sure not by the majority.
There are people predicting crashes all the time… So many crashes that never happened. Just because someone predicts it doesn’t mean that it is going to happen.
Also, I don’t think the crash is going to be what people here seem to expect. It’s not like AI is going to die and just go away. The hype will just slow down and some companies will probably die. But its not like the technology will vanish and the hardware will be useless. Datacenters will still be used.
Its more like the dotcom bubble if the president was also clearly taking bribes and had significant interest is picking winners.
Some AI companies are going to keep going providing the marginal value that they do. Just some of them will lose.
Place your bets but the house wins
