Just as an example: On Friday a data centre was announced in Nova Scotia, with the premier and a couple of MPs in attendance, and later in the day the client for the data centre was announced as Anthropic. Almost like the officials in attendance at the data centre announcement didn’t want to have to answer questions about what good a local data centre with an American Big Tech client does us.
Anyone who invested in data centres on the last year is already seeing their stock in trouble. The dot Com bubble pop wasnt due to mom and pop internet sites going under. It came from the massive oversupply in fiberoptic that companies like Cisco poured money into, and all related funds that followed them.
There is a massive glut in data center projects relative to the shrinking demand for LLMs etc. The bubble is popping.
I can’t wait get my hands on some cheap-ass server hardware. Having an in-home, offline, Hal 9000 is gonna be a lot more fun than having my boss slop out mass emails every 30 min.
I just hope we actually see it in the used market. I would not be surprised to see these billionaire fucks destroy it all rather than allow the plebes to have access to decent hardware.
Shrinking demand for LLMs? What planet are you living on?
If you look at OpenRouter’s history back a year you can see the massive explosion in inference tokens consumed. https://openrouter.ai/rankings?view=month#top-models Obviously that’s not a perfect representation of the entire market given that the major companies also provide their own inference, but it’s the largest public view of usage and is likely extremely representative of what’s going on behind the scenes.
The only thing holding more organizations back from using even more inference is cost, so any sort of “pop” is just going to immediately be eaten up by increased usage at slightly lower prices.
Will a bunch of investors lose their shirts? Absolutely, but there is no lack of demand for datacenters right now.
The cost is increasing as providers are incredibly far off from the profit promises they gave investors. An estimated 6 trillion in productivity is required for the investments to break even, and the reality is things are way off the mark.
https://futurism.com/future-society/data-centers-trillion-capital-time-bomb-bain
Add to that serious problems measuring ROI, public backlash, CEO cynicism.
That planet.
