Comment by stego-tech

Seconding that observation. The IT folks in charge of the compute direction have been quietly raising those concerns for over a decade (“and what happens to those alleged lower costs when their attention diverts to a new industry or pumping margins for shareholders?”), and the major enterprises or customers had all but migrated wholesale into public CSPs - and been eyeing the exit when they finally opened those eye-watering bills IT had kept forwarding to stakeholders. The industry wasn’t going to collapse so much as right-size, and that would turn into an inevitable cycle of churn (higher prices to drive margins, leading to more customers leaving in part or in whole, which would drive up costs higher to continue delivering positive results, ad infinitum).

The current AI build and boom has done wonders to their bottom lines in the immediate, but even Wall Street has its limits, and it sounds like there’s decreasing appetite for such CAPEX builds without associated proven revenue. That might kill some companies outright, but more likely it’ll force the major CSPs into the churn cycle that much faster.