I am pretty optimistic that as long as hardware capacity exists, people will find ways of using it. Whether it will be profitable or not is another story of course.
Rivers overflowing with legacy hardware and villages incinerating boards for their metals, and the caustic effects on people & their environment that causes, are already happening. The hardware capacity exists only as long as it is operational and within a few generations. Perhaps we should be careful before building Manhattan-sized data centers.
Up to a point it is better than having additional compute sitting idle at the edge, economies of scale and all that, but after some point it becomes excess and wasteful, even if people figure out ways to entertain themselves with it.
And if people don't want to pay what it costs to improve and maintain these city-sized electronic brains? Then it all becomes waste, or the majority transformed into office or warehouse space or something else.
Proceeding with combined 1% (US GDP)-sized budgets despite this risk being an elephant in the room is what makes it a bubble.
I completely agree with a lot of your points; the whole thing is quite stupid. My only objection is that the infrastructure will probably not go unused. And if we are lucky, those uses will be better than helping teenagers cheat themselves out of a good education.
kevindamm|7 months ago
Up to a point it is better than having additional compute sitting idle at the edge, economies of scale and all that, but after some point it becomes excess and wasteful, even if people figure out ways to entertain themselves with it.
And if people don't want to pay what it costs to improve and maintain these city-sized electronic brains? Then it all becomes waste, or the majority transformed into office or warehouse space or something else.
Proceeding with combined 1% (US GDP)-sized budgets despite this risk being an elephant in the room is what makes it a bubble.
michalf6|7 months ago
Nvidia sold ~3M blackwells in 2025: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-has-sold-over-three-million-blac...
Compare that to laptops which sell in tens of millions per manufacturer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laptop_brands_and_manu...
Plus, it's way easier to collect boards for recycling from a centralized data center.
entropi|7 months ago