Comment by mattmanser
7 days ago
Someone's take on AI was that we're collectively investing billions in data centers that will be utterly worthless in 10 years.
Unlike the investments in railways or telephone cables or roads or any other sort of architecture, this investment has a very short lifespan.
Their point was that whatever your take on AI, the present investment in data centres is a ridiculous waste and will always end up as a huge net loss compared to most other investments our societies could spend it on.
Maybe we'll invent AGI and he'll be proven wrong as they'll pay back themselves many times over, but I suspect they'll ultimately be proved right and it'll all end up as land fill.
The servers may well be worthless (or at least worth a lot less), but that's pretty much true for a long time. Not many people want to run on 10 year old servers (although I pay $30/month for a dedicated server that's dual Xeon L5640 or something like that, which is about 15 years old).
The servers will be replaced, the networking equipment will be replaced. The building will still be useful, the fiber that was pulled to internet exchanges/etc will still be useful, the wiring to the electric utility will still be useful (although I've certainly heard stories of datacenters where much of the floor space is unusable, because power density of racks has increased and the power distribution is maxed out)
I have a server in my office that's at from 2009 still far more economical to run than buying any sort of cloud compute. By at least an order of magnitude.
Perhaps if you only need to run some old PHP app.
What kind of disk and how much memory is in there?
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If it is all a waste and a bubble, I wonder what the long term impact will be of the infrastructure upgrades around these dcs. A lot of new HV wires and substations are being built out. Cities are expanding around clusters of dcs. Are they setting themselves up for a new rust belt?
Or early provisioning for massively expanded electric transit and EV charging infrastructure, perhaps.
There are a lot of examples of former industrial sites (rust belts) that are now redeveloped into data center sites because the infra is already partly there and the environment might be beneficial, politically, environmentally/geographically. For example many old industrial sites relied on water for cooling and transportation. This water can now be used to cool data centers. I think you are onto something though, if you depart from the history of these places and extrapolate into the future.
Maybe the dcs could be turned into some mean cloud gaming servers?
Sure, but what about the collective investment in smartphones, digital cameras, laptops, even cars. Not much modern technology is useful and practical after 10 years, let alone 20. AI is probably moving a little faster than normal, but technology depreciation is not limited to AI.
If a coal powered electric plant it next to the data-center you might be able to get electric cheap enough to keep it going.
Datacenters could go into the business of making personal PC's or workstations using the older NVIDIA cards and sell them.
They probably are right, but a counter argument could be how people thought going to the moon was pointless and insanely expensive, but the technology to put stuff in space and have GPS and comms satellites probably paid that back 100x
Reality is that we don’t know how much of a trope this statement is.
I think we would get all this technology without going to the moon or Space Shuttle program. GPS, for example, was developed for military applications initially.
I don’t mean to invalidate your point (about genuine value arising from innovations originating from the Apollo program), but GPS and comms satellites (and heck, the Internet) are all products of nuclear weapons programs rather than civilian space exploration programs (ditto the Space Shuttle, and I could go on…).
Yes, and no. The people working on GPS paid very close attention to the papers from JPL researchers describing their timing and ranging techniques for both Apollo and deep-space probes. There was more cross-pollination than meets the eye.
It's not that going to the Moon was pointless, but stopping after we'd done little more than planted a flag was. Werner von Braun was the head architect of the Apollo Program and the Moon was intended as little more than a stepping stone towards setting up a permanent colony on Mars. Incidentally this is also the technical and ideological foundation of what would become the Space Shuttle and ISS, which were both also supposed to be little more than small scale tools on this mission, as opposed to ends in and of themselves.
Imagine if Columbus verified that the New World existed, planted a flag, came back - and then everything was cancelled. Or similarly for literally any colonization effort ever. That was the one downside of the space race - what we did was completely nonsensical, and made sense only because of the context of it being a 'race' and politicians having no greater vision than beyond the tip of their nose.
I’ve been enjoying that Apple TV show with alternative history as if we’d kept going. It’s kinda dumb in parts but still fun to imagine!
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This isn’t my original take but if it results in more power buildout, especially restarting nuclear in the US, that’s an investment that would have staying power.
Utterly? Moores law per power requirement is dead, lower power units can run electric heating for small towns!