this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
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Turns out a business plan consisting of »build a trillion dollars of server farms now, figure out who pays later« gets slightly less charming once the lenders ask for actual numbers. The AI industry wanted to disrupt every profession except the ancient art of checking whether the math works.
"We plan to shoot for the moon and land on a pile of money" classic Silicon Valley businessplan.
Considering how tech CEOs are acting, with their bunkers, bodyguards, remote islands and rockets, I'm not sure they planned to come back after leaving with all our money.
Talk is they're planning on staying away while money and debts inflates away to zero and come back with all the deeds when the fighting stops.
Don't you need a functioning government for a deed to have value?
What do you think the private militaries are for?
What are you going use to pay them?
The deeds. Keep up!
The promise of being one tier above the rest once their new world is in place.
The promise of not having to be reduced to mere farmers, cattle herders and other manual labourers.
The promise of not being the oppressed but the helping hand of the oppressor.
Hookers, don't forget their hooker stockpile.
Isn't this also how the dot-com bubble sort of happened?
Yes, and every bubble before, since, and hereafter.
Dibs on being early to the next tulip bull run
The next one will be one same. Humans don't learn from mistakes.
The AI bust will be an order of magnitude worse. The money involved is staggering. AI is almost all of America's GPD and a monster chunk of stock valuation.
Yep, and like the dot-com bubble, businesses have tied themselves too closely with AI to the point it'll be harder to backtrack and pull out than with the dot-com boom. At least word of mouth and having a website were easily separable from the business end. Having a website and integrating AI into your website and your business is a whole different story.
This one has everyone's retirement money tied into it.
All of these companies are not publicly traded. The “big ones” that build the data centers will lose a lot of value but will continue to exist.
The LLM companies deserve to & should go under.
Ah, let me introduce you to my friend "Sytemic Risk"
As someone on the inside, I can assure you that the buyers put down money up front for a specified product and delivery date. There is no speculation involved. They line up to give us money. Unless Microsoft et al. goes bankrupt, we keep building.
It's not an issue of prediction, or prophesy, it's that all the available information right now looks like a classic bubble. could it find profitably? idk. is it profitable? No. is there billions or trillions in debt changing hands too fast for anyone to keep track of? yes. is someone selling somke? most likely these are the situations in which con artists thrive. probably not everyone is intending to sell smoke. but not all of this is going to work out, some may come out on top, but some will fall, and that will be a bubble.
Agreed.
Going a step further, the builders that build with environmental and community concerns first are more likely to endure. My company does exactly that.
FTA:
Would you dispute these claims, based on your experience?
Not at all. Most builders are clueless. They think that because they have money, they can solve any problems.
Edit: Adding that site selection is HARD. Every developer with a spare farm plot wants in on the action. Most are completely inappropriate.
lmao, which department do you work in that you're on lemmy right now? Mail, or maybe food service?
Operations. DC manager.
So, HR? I would delete your location, btw. Don't out yourself.
There are more than a dozen datacenters within 30 minutes of my home.
So, many are getting blocked and the AI bubble is going to pop in the next few years. Right now, this is where we stand. Notice, most are getting built where there is a lack of cool weather and water. Many states are starting to fight them because of this.
https://www.electricchoice.com/datacenters/
Honestly, I am confused by the rushed build out. If I was wealthy, I would be trying to ensure that my wealth isn't being burned away for nothing. Having properly placed and authorized data centers would help protect my investment.
The Dotcom bubble and the 2008 housing crisis are still in living memory. Are the wealthy just that unaware - or worse, uncaring - about how things could play out? 🤨
A fool and his money, people really confuse success with cleverness, intelligence, and even foresight, often successful people don't even know why they're successful, and statistically it rarely has to do with their personal choices, it's often dumb luck, people rarely have original ideas and make novel choices, human gonna human.
I hate AI too but nothing this person is saying rings untrue to me. Even the article admits that data centers continue to be built, albeit slower. I know we all want the bubble to pop, but that could still be a ways off.
It's not a bubble because of guess work, it's a bubble because AI companies are taking on absurd amounts of debt, are trading that debt very quickly between themselves, and none of them have been able to show a profit and they are cheating every number in their favor and it still isn't showing any profitably. so it's not if the bubble bursts, it's more, will this bullshit keep going if they never find profitably. all their avenues are pretty garbage, tokens are replacing payroll as a cut target for business, and the productivity they provide is not meeting need, AI slop is unpopular, police and military are slowly realizing a language model isn't a reliable detective/ director of operations, also voters are alarmed they are trying to let AI do literally one of the most dangerous jobs you could trust to what's effectively a particularly verbose racist toddler
Sure, Jan.
If we are not going to have honest discussion, why participate? Lemmy should be better.
So a post making claims against all visible evidence with no proof for any of it is "honest discussion"?
You ask "why believe me?" I ask " why take you seriously?" And we get nowhere.
The popular opinion is framed in view of the worst offenders. That gets clicks. My daily experience shows me that:
However, others are not like us. Musk runs gas turbines for primary power. MS uses open- loop cooling. They get the headlines. We don't. Our business is based on responsible behavior. But we get painted with the same brush.
Ok, even assuming all that is true (just saying it doesnt make it so) none of it has anything to do with the inherent unprofitability of AI. Anthropic alone is reporting an $80 billion loss for the year. Last I heard the industry as a whole needs to make a few trillion dollars just to break even. Regardless of how efficient or not your particular data center may be, it's not going to fill that gap.
Agreed. Oai, Anthro, etc don't necessarily have paths forward. But a LOT of folks want their hands on the results. Perhaps real open sw will rise to put them under and no one will need to pay for the models. But they will have to pay for the hardware to run it. And that's pricey. And we get paid up front.