But there’s a counterargument: Every transformative infrastructure build-out begins with a bubble. The railroads of the 1840s, the electrical grid of the 1900s, the fiber-optic networks of the 1990s all involved speculative excess, but all left behind infrastructure that powered decades of subsequent growth. One question is whether AI infrastructure is like the dot-com bubble (which left behind useful fiber and data centers) or the housing bubble (which left behind empty subdivisions and a financial crisis).
The real question when faced with a bubble is What will be the source of value in what is left? It most likely won’t be in the AI chips, which have a short useful life. It may not even be in the data centers themselves. It may be in a new approach to programming that unlocks entirely new classes of applications. But one pretty good bet is that there will be enduring value in the energy infrastructure build-out.
C'est probablement vrai, mais c'est une vision très long-termiste sans considération pour les victimes au moment de l'éclatement de ces bulles.
Our bet for the most likely prick to pop the bubble is that Anthropic and Google’s success against OpenAI persuades investors that OpenAI will not be able to pay for the massive amount of data center capacity it has contracted for. Given the company’s centrality to the AGI singularity narrative, a failure of belief in OpenAI could bring down the whole web of interconnected data center bets, many of them financed by debt. But that’s not the only possibility.