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The AI Investment Boom

(www.apricitas.io)
271 points m-hodges | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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hn_throwaway_99 ◴[] No.41896346[source]
Reading this makes me willing to bet that this capital intensive investment boom will be similar to other enormous capital investment booms in US history, such as the laying of the railroads in the 1800s, the proliferation of car companies in the early 1900s, and the telecom fiber boom in the late 1900s. In all of these cases there was an enormous infrastructure (over) build out, followed by a crash where nearly all the companies in the industry ended up in bankruptcy, but then that original infrastructure build out had huge benefits for the economy and society as that infrastructure was "soaked up" in the subsequent years. E.g. think of all the telecom investment and subsequent bankruptcies in the late 90s/early 00s, but then all that dark fiber that was laid was eventually lit up and allowed for the explosion of high quality multimedia growth (e.g. Netflix and the like).

I think that will happen here. I think your average investor who's currently paying for all these advanced chips, data centers and energy supplies will walk away sorely disappointed, but this investment will yield huge dividends down the road. Heck, I think the energy investment alone will end up accelerating the switch away from fossil fuels, despite AI often being portrayed as a giant climate warming energy hog (which I'm not really disputing, but now that renewables are the cheapest form of energy, I believe this huge, well-funded demand will accelerate the growth of non-carbon energy sources).

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irunmyownemail ◴[] No.41903917[source]
A few thoughts, Netflix works fine over an old, slow DSL connection. Fossil fuels aren't going away this century, especially not with power hungry AI (setting aside discussion on whether AI is truly worth it).
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1. baby_souffle ◴[] No.41904484[source]
> A few thoughts, Netflix works fine over an old, slow DSL connection.

debatable depending on what "fine" means. In any case, DSL really doesn't go far.

The old version from the early 2000's could work out to a few miles / km but only with absolutely perfect condition copper. The newer DSL versions are limited to much less distance even with good quality cable.

Each neighborhood has a head-end that does the copper <-> fiber transition. Unless you lived _really_ close to the Central Office, your DSL service was probably copper only for a few blocks before it transitioned to fiber going from TelCo central office to all the individual DSLAMs scattered about.