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Comment by redanddead | Hacker News Reader

> My takeaway: the AI data center buildout is an overbuild probably at least as large as the fiber buildout that left us with so much dark fiber. If not even bigger. The only thing that will save the economy is the inability of NVIDIA and chip fabs to produce enough chips to match the buildout planned.

I never understand the mindset that leads to these massive leaps in reasoning. I was recruiting a guy, he was a VC GP, he says the same thing. I think he’s wrong. The more we use the more we want to use.

Do we seriously think our species will jinx the Kardashev energy requirements

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The unjustified leap here seems to be talking about Kardashev every requirements with relation to data centers.

Every massive technological leap that have big private buildouts results in massive overbuild. It's the nature of FOMO when a big civilization changing tech gets introduced.

Will AI change everything? Are too many data centers planned? The answer is almost certainly yes to both.

Didn't the overbuild of fiber directly lead to Google buying up dark fiber, and then lighting it up later on to power YouTube? I ran across this when I was trying to figure out why YouTube has no real competitors, and the explanations I ran across were basically “Google has an immense economic advantage because of their control over all this extra bandwidth capacity". I have not further validated that in the couple of years since I read it, but it does make me wonder what excess AI capacity could lead to.

> Didn't the overbuild of fiber directly lead to Google buying up dark fiber, and then lighting it up later

Yes, but the lag there is decade-long, and a bunch of heavily fibre-invested companies went bust before anyone saw the upside.

In the same vein, it's very possible that early movers-and-shakers in the LLM space will overextend and end up bankrupt before LLMs find a long-term profitable niche

Yep, the decade-long timeline about matches what I recall. Agree on the culling that's coming in the AI space as well. Temporal's comment from a couple of days ago about inside vs. outside AI has been thought-provoking as I think about who is going to go bust...

Regardless, we'll need the processing power and the energy

Is that best spent on LLMs, world models, physical AI, who knows. But we'll need the infrastructure, what's being built is conservative

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