Mr.Milkshake said:
Some of the largest companies in the world that grew faster than any other company ever with revenues in multiple B are still growing at 3-10x and ppl think there's a bubble.
It's truly wild what you can convince a person of with memes and one liners
JB99 said:
I think it's a bubble because the rate of expense and build out is outpacing adoption. At some point they have to slow down and let users catch up and adopt the tech. We are probably getting close. I think the next wave of models they role out they'll realize that while super powerful people haven't figured out how to leverage that power, so it's just idle until people catch up. Plus they'll want to charge a premium for them but without use cases people won't pay for it
YouBet said:bmks270 said:HollywoodBQ said:
This entire thread is tragic.
Personally, I can't wait for the data center build out bubble to burst
It's going to be Broomfield, Colorado, 2001 all over again.
I don't think there is a build out bubble because they are limited by the power shortage and backlog of gas turbines for power. They don't have a way to power all of the data centers they want to build. Many announced data centers are being delayed or the plans being abandoned.
There probably is an AI investment bubble though.
Related to this, Elon was discussing this at Davos this year and said at some point this summer we will have chips sitting on shelves because there aren't enough DC's available to use them for all of the planned AI build out. If he's correct, then we are going to hit a wall this year on DC's anyway.
It can easily be argued AI investment is a bubble. The sheer amount of circularity in that space deems it to be so.
I agree with Burdizzo(?) that these things are going to happen in some form or fashion pretty much no matter what so we have to figure out a way to force them to be good neighbors.
AggieKatie2 said:
Fine with data centers, but need to minimize valuable resource utilization for them.
(Farmable land and water, ensure pollution limits)
500,000ags said:
I might be wrong, but I believe we were in disagreement previously regarding the near-term future of AI within the Product org. Sorry, if I'm getting posters mixed up. We were discussing AI code work, and I took the position that Series B Product work was ripe for AI-generated code since there is a lack of tech and data debt. Now that there has been a good 5-6 months, I'm curious what is driving your concern for a bubble? Is it purely the over investment (and investor-customer relationships) or has there been any communication with your Product org that hints at anything hard to monetize?
500,000ags said:
Curious, have you tracked token usage on these projects?
Charpie said:
Some of y'all have your heads in the sand.
I am married to a man that owns thousands of rural acres in West Texas. We also own land in town. If you rural folks want to be angry, be angry at your neighbor who sold their land because they couldn't afford to ranch anymore. Be angry at the county commissioners or state for throwing money at the tech companies for building these data centers. They are a boom economically for these cash poor counties. The tax benefits are going help build infrastructure for these counties, along with schools and roads.
My backyard from my house in West Texas has a beautiful view. I would be sad if a data center came up between my house and my view. But at the end of the day, I understand why it has to be this way. I don't want to stay behind China and be held hostage by China.
Quote:
The only thing growing faster than the artificial-intelligence industry may be Americans' negative feelings about itas former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt saw on Friday.
Delivering a commencement address at the University of Arizona, Schmidt told students the "technological transformation" wrought by artificial intelligence will be "larger, faster and more consequential than what came before." Like some other graduation speakers mentioning AI, Schmidt was met with a chorus of boos.
Trump recently said data centers "need some PR help."
"There's a disconnect between what we're saying and what is happening out there, and I think that's the issue we have to address," Ernest Popescu, CEO of the company developing the data center in Indianapolis that Gibson had approved, told the crowd.
Quote:
Consumers resent energy-price jumps exacerbated by the spread of data centers. Workers fear widespread job losses. Parents worry about AI undermining education and harming children's mental health. In recent months, the wave of anger has brought protests, swayed election results and spurred isolated acts of violence.
Quote:
The poll showed about 30% of Democrats think America should accelerate AI innovation as quickly as possible, compared with roughly half of Republicans and 77% of tech founders.
Quote:
Local opposition blocked or delayed at least 48 projects valued at some $156 billion last year, according to Data Center Watch, an organization tracking the trend. A record of 20 were canceled in the first quarter of the year because of local backlash, figures from climate-media outlet and data provider Heatmap show. Dozens more are currently facing similar obstacles on top of obstructions because of permitting snafus and equipment shortages.
On Monday, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller called for a moratorium on new hyperscale data-center development in the state, citing concerns about the costs to farmers and strain on the power grid.
Quote:
The artificial intelligence gold rush is rapidly drying up the supply of the one resource that AI developers can't do without: computing power.
The sharp capacity crunch has caused consternation among power users, forced companies to scuttle products and led to reliability problems. The issues are a warning sign for the AI boom, as they may limit the utility of powerful new AI tools just as massive amounts of users have begun to rely on them to boost productivity.
Companies have been scrambling to secure the availability of computing capacity needed to serve a growing base of customers who are also significantly increasing their AI use.
Quote:
OpenAI scrapped its Sora video-generation app in part to free up computing resources to power coding and enterprise products that would work on a new AI model, code-named Spud, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Token use in OpenAI's APIa platform where mostly enterprise users access its softwarerose from six billion a minute in October to 15 billion a minute in late March.
"I do spend a lot of time trying to find any last-minute compute available," Sarah Friar, OpenAI's chief financial officer, said in a recent public video interview with an investor. "We're making some very tough trades at the moment on things we're not pursuing because we don't have enough compute."
Quote:
Spot-market prices to access Nvidia's GPUs, or graphics processing units, in data-center clouds have risen sharply in recent months across the company's entire product line, according to Ornn, a New York-based data provider that publishes market data and structures financial products around GPU pricing.
Renting one of Nvidia's most-advanced Blackwell generation of chips for one hour costs $4.08, up 48% from the $2.75 it cost two months ago, according to the Ornn Compute Price Index.
"There's a massive capacity crunch that's unlike anything I've seen in the more than five years I've been running this business," said J.J. Kardwell, chief executive of Vultr, a cloud infrastructure company. "The question is, why don't we just deploy more gear? The lead times are too long. Data center build times are long, the power that's available through 2026 is already all spoken for."
Logos Stick said:
That's why, unless you are paying, AI chat is worthless now. You get a couple of prompts and it's locked until the next day (I'm exaggerating a bit but it has gotten real bad).
GROK was at the point where every attempt for about a week failed. It told me it was under heavy usage and to upgrade to SuperGROK. GROK inside X is prioritized and still functions most of the time.
Logos Stick said:
One thing that has not been discussed, at least I haven't seen it, is the exponential growth in software that will occur because of AI. Training and inference is the focus, but the code that will be genned for just about everything under the sun is going to be another factor in the DC expansion. The coding problem has been solved. I now have numerous apps running on my personal domain in Railway that do financial management (I completely replaced Rocket Money) and various other functions for me. It was never worth doing that before AI came along, too much effort. Now it's almost effortless.
Logos Stick said:
One thing that has not been discussed, at least I haven't seen it, is the exponential growth in software that will occur because of AI. Training and inference is the focus, but the code that will be genned for just about everything under the sun is going to be another factor in the DC expansion. The coding problem has been solved. I now have numerous apps running on my personal domain in Railway that do financial management (I completely replaced Rocket Money) and various other functions for me. It was never worth doing that before AI came along, too much effort. Now it's almost effortless.
LMCane said:Logos Stick said:
One thing that has not been discussed, at least I haven't seen it, is the exponential growth in software that will occur because of AI. Training and inference is the focus, but the code that will be genned for just about everything under the sun is going to be another factor in the DC expansion. The coding problem has been solved. I now have numerous apps running on my personal domain in Railway that do financial management (I completely replaced Rocket Money) and various other functions for me. It was never worth doing that before AI came along, too much effort. Now it's almost effortless.
are we really going to need "financial advisors" who take 1% AUM over 20 years (about $120,000)
when I can just use my AI agents to set everything for me?
Urban Country Boy said:YouBet said:Urban Country Boy said:Coates said:Principal Uncertainty said:jpb1999 said:Principal Uncertainty said:TAMUallen said:
Data centers are going to be such an issue for electricity grids
Most maga-size data centers are installing their own generation and not even connecting to any grid. But many mid-size ones are, so point is partially valid. Also, with the new high-powered severs being liquid cooled, they will just use a heat exchanger to a cooling tower. So, no refrigerated chiller and fin-fan coolers. The cooling towers will use much less electricity (for the cooling, not the chip power), so it's by far the cheaper way to go. But evaporative cooling does consume water, so in dry place like west Texas where cheap fuel gas exists wil, indeed, need to manage the water consumption.
Most are going to a closed loop system with little water use.
No, they are not. Closed loop chilling for the building envelope, but future servers will have liquid immersion for cooling with plate and frame heat exchangers directly to an evaporative cooling tower. They are in the prototype stage now, but will be the future of compute.
Liquid immersion has been the 'future' for at least a decade and is way past the prototype stage, this has not and will likely not be widespread adopted anytime soon.
ETA that if a user went liquid immersion there is absolutely no water needed, it would use a specialized fluid.
This is being used now. I would have liked to see the reaction of the data guys when they were told, "We have an idea. We are going to submerge your servers to cool them".
So what are the current standards for data centers and are all new DC's being built for AI following them? Closed loop vs open loop? Immersion?
Data centers are not all being built for AI. Microsoft, Amazon, etc. are still the big owners. Immersion is still new. But closed loop is how things have gone. There is a reduction in evaporative cooling.
500,000ags said:
Build so China doesn't beat us. Okay, sure. They'll take themselves down much faster than they take us down with an LLM. Artificial intelligence is a misnomer. It's artificial inference. Tokens are literally syllables. Literally syllables. Where the intense compute and well-trained models allow for incredible syllable matching. That's what historical hallucinations were. It wasn't providing a wrong answer. It was pulling the wrong syllables. LLMs are a paradigm shifter, but there is a reason why Anthropic didn't want their syllable models responsible for life and death decisions. Even if it made the right call, no one could understand why it pulled those sources for that response, when it might have pulled others a few seconds later. Everyone is truly scared to fully embed because no one wants to be the guinea for the lack of indemnification. But yeah, China is going to get us with their nonsense. They can't even keep Covid off their shoes.
Urban Country Boy said:agracer said:jpb1999 said:Principal Uncertainty said:TAMUallen said:
Data centers are going to be such an issue for electricity grids
Most maga-size data centers are installing their own generation and not even connecting to any grid. But many mid-size ones are, so point is partially valid. Also, with the new high-powered severs being liquid cooled, they will just use a heat exchanger to a cooling tower. So, no refrigerated chiller and fin-fan coolers. The cooling towers will use much less electricity (for the cooling, not the chip power), so it's by far the cheaper way to go. But evaporative cooling does consume water, so in dry place like west Texas where cheap fuel gas exists wil, indeed, need to manage the water consumption.
Most are going to a closed loop system with little water use.
but require more electricity.
Please explain.
flown-the-coop said:Urban Country Boy said:flown-the-coop said:Urban Country Boy said:flown-the-coop said:Urban Country Boy said:flown-the-coop said:
CenTrio uses it and it's not 30 years old.
Central chillers is a big deal in many places, Houston being one of if not the biggest and the first.
https://www.centrioenergy.com/case-studies/houston-ice-battery/
And yes, several systems out there to recover 10%-30% of evaporated water, which is only a very small portion of the water utilized in the cooling towers.
Keep your mind open, you will learn more.
How do you recover evaporated water?
Most refer to it as condensation.
I take from this you have no idea what you are talking about. Condensation is from the cooling coils. Evaporative cooling is from cooling towers, and is not recovered.
I take it you have never had distilled water, spirits, beer, etc. Have you ever seen it rain and are you familiar with the water cycle?
Evaporative cooling towers work the same as all other methods of heating and cooling and its driven by heat exchange. Most of the heat exchange is from evaporation but only about 1% of water is evaporated per pass and the vapor plume can be equipped to condense that vapor back to recovered water via various methods.
My degrees are in accounting and information systems. But they are decidedly irrelevant to a basic understanding of the physical states of H2O.
You have no idea what you are talking about. This is not beer. ME '88. No, not 1 percent is evaporated. Reference my high rise example of 80 gallons a minute needed for make up.
You have no idea how cooling towers work. I do not disparage my fellow Ags but you need to sit this one out.
Tell us how they work and cite your sources. Maybe get the slide rule out and show us the calcs.
I notice you dropped your ice battery misinformation after that was cited. I don't think I need to clutter the thread up about cooling towers and how evaporative cooling works, but to think all water is flash steamed in evaporative cooling and lost permanently to the atmosphere never to become water again is frankly bizarre, but who knows what they taught in ME back in the mid 80s.
Fact remains only ~1% of water is evaporated during each pass and 10%-30% of that can be recovered. Rather than trying to shout down at someone who may have been familiar but who went back to check the facts, and looked into any new developments (I was not aware that they have figured out an approach to "ice battery" backups and is in use and not some failed technology from 30 years ago.
https://spxcooling.com/news/how-to-conserve-water-in-evaporative-cooling-towers/
Enjoy some reading and again an open mind is needed to learn. Spouting an engineering degree from 40 years ago is not open minded.
infinity ag said:
Data Centers, okay but don't give these corps any freebies. That is all I care about. If they ruin the environment, jail the C levels and fine them BIG.
