Comment by simne

It is not just engineering. There are also huge, very huge, investments into infrastructure.

As already answered, AI companies use extremely expensive setups (servers with professional cards) in large numbers and all these things concentrated in big datcenters with powerful networking and huge power consumption.

Imagine - last time, so huge investments (~1.2% of GDP, and unknown if investments will grow or not) was into telecom infrastructure - mostly wired telephones, but also cable TV and later added Internet and cell communications and clouds (in some countries wired phones just don't cover whole country and they jumped directly into wireless communications).

Larger investments was into railroads - ~6% of GDP (and I'm also not sure, some people said, AI will surpass them as share of possible for AI tasks constantly grow).

So to conclude, just now AI boom looks like main consumer of telecom (Internet) and cloud infrastructure. If you've seen old mainframes in datacenters, and extremely thick core network cables (with hundreds wires or fibers in just one cable), and huge satellite dishes, you could imagine, what I'm talking about.

And yes, I'm not sure, will this boom end like dot-coms (Y2K), or such huge usage of resources will sustain. Why it is not obvious, because for telecoms (internet) also was unknown, if people will use phones and other p2p communications for leisure as now, or will leave phones just for work. Even worse, if AI agents become ordinary things, possible scenario, number of AI agents will surpass number of people.