Did our demand for social media apps suddenly blow up? Because our DC demand seems to be blowing up.
You'd think the datacenter boom would have happened during COVID when everyone was stuck at home ordering everything online, streaming everything and doing zoom calls all day as they work from home.
But the fact that it's happening now is weird. Everyone I know has cooled on AI, even my most AI loving friends are no longer using it for art, porn or therapy.
So is it all speculative? Companies hoping to get in on the "AI goldrush"?
Could this be nefarious? Instead of one big underground secret military datacenter, distribute a resilient network of regular datacenters all around the country that are also used for civilian purposes.
The most effective enemy propaganda is called "sticker shock". When the sticker goes up in a week, it's double propaganda. I'm fully onboard with the idea of stopping the propaganda producers from continuing to do it.
On the other hand, the Chinese lag way behind in data centers. Odd.
Clearly you're in the last quarter of the demographic described.
In addition to the bot farms, many in the AI related fields have plenty of perverse incentives to participate - for reasons other than genuine interest. That's why I don't read those threads, although the marketing angle is easy to see it's also prevalent and laboring to filter out all 90% of it isn't worth the effort.
In general, if you are observing a community, and you see what looks like a contradiction like this, almost every time what you're actually seeing is Two Guys: in this case, one portion of the HN userbase that hates datacenters, and another portion that has to change their underwear every time Anthropic puts out new release notes.
Very few communities like HN are genuinely monolithic, and very few people are going to hold such contradictory beliefs within the same individual.