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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

> When the early-electrification bubble built, we were left with the grid. And when the dot-com bubble burst, we were left with a lot of valuable infrastructure whose cost was sunk, in particular dark fibre. The AI bubble? Not so much.

Except for the physical buildings, permitting, and power grid build-out.

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Thinking about data center capacity. How much new capacity we actually need? Ignoring AI that is. Will there be demand for this and will that demand cover the maintenance in the interim. Power-grid capacity as long as it is not too expensive could be reasonable use. But buildings and permits and so on might be less.

I was also wondering if the GPUs that die and need to be replaced actually become inert blocks of fused silicon or do they work at half speed or something? A data center full of half speed GPUs is still a lot of computing power waiting for somebody to use.

> computing power waiting for somebody to use.

This is how "serverless" became a thing btw.

Maybe? inetd subprocesses on UNIX time sharing systems does look to be the first appearance of what we'd recognize as being serverless, but the timesharing concept was already on its way out in favour of personal computers by that time. It's questionable how much timesharing is responsible for its creation, despite the overlap. It seems more likely that the new age of networked personal computers looking for ways to interact with each other was the major driving force.

Of course, we didn't call it "serverless" back then. If you are referring to the name rather than the technology, I'd credit Ruby on Rails. It is what brought the app server back into fashion, being way too slow for the serverless technologies used before it, and it was that which allowed serverless to also come back into fashion again once developer started getting away from Rails, paving the way for the branding refresh we now know.

> Except for the physical buildings, permitting, and power grid build-out.

Those are extremely localized at a bunch of data centers and how much of that will see further use? And how much grid work has really happened (there are a lot of announcement about plans to maybe build nuclear reactor etc., but those projects take a lot of time, if ever done)

nVidia managed to pivot their customer base from crypto mining to AI.

> Those are extremely localized at a bunch of data centers and how much of that will see further use?

As much as there is market for somewhat-less-expensive data centers. (Data centers where somebody else already paid the cost of construction.)

And where they are doesn't matter. The internet is good at shipping bits to various places.

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