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Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers
- christophilus 10mo agoAxios hijacks the back button. The TLDR is: we’re building too much speculative capacity and the “if we build it, they will come” assumption will be proven wrong.
- kouunji 10mo agoSuch bad behavior on the back button - it’s such a shabby trick, and makes me think less of any site that pulls that.
- walthamstow 10mo agoI always think about the developers who were asked to implement something like this
- blell 10mo agoIt's always a bug. Usually, some issue with an iframe navigating to another html page, which makes the back button go back in the iframe instead of the page itself. This usually happens because of an ad, which makes me wonder why people are still navigating without ad blockers.
- scottyeager 10mo agoHappens to me even with an ad blocker.
- throwaway_ocr 10mo agoSorry, what do you mean by this? Back button seems to work normally for me.
- Havoc 10mo agoYeah annoying. Need to find an extension to fix that.
- joquarky 10mo agoBrowsers need a "toggle scripts" button up with the back/reload buttons. Back in the 90s, I could hit the Esc key and stop all of the animations, allowing my ADHD brain to regain the focus needed to read the actual article.
- Havoc 10mo agoWell there is noscript but that breaks a ton of stuff
- fweimer 10mo ago> I am also deeply concerned about the “speculative” data center market. The “build it and they will come”strategy is a trap. If you are a hyperscaler, you will own your own data centers. Is this actually true? I thought that hyperscalers keep datacenters at arm's length, using subsidiaries and outsourcing a lot of things.
- Analemma_ 10mo agoHyperscalers use various subsidiaries and shell companies to dodge taxes and keep the debt off their balance sheets so they can keep their AAA ratings, but ultimately the resulting datacenters are still entirely owned and operated in-house. Hyperscales do not and will not use any of these “DC as a service” startups, meaning those startups have to find customers elsewhere; the big question mark is whether enough of those customers exist.
- gtirloni 10mo agoIf/when the AI bubble pops and we're left with hundreds of underutilized datacenters, I think this could be good for hosting customers by driving prices down across the board. Maybe it will make self-hosting even more cheaper than public clouds.
- stetrain 10mo agoAren't these datacenters biased majorly towards GPU capacity? Maybe we'll see a resurgence of cloud game streaming initiatives.
- piva00 10mo agoThe GPUs being used for AI training aren't useful for running games, I highly doubt they could be repurposed for that. They can run other ML stuff but I don't see how the world could absorb the amount of compute/RAM for these other workflows. Since the hardware itself depreciates quite fast compared to the buildings, the long lasting physical structure is probably the best bet, being repurposed for more general computing (since all HVAC, electricity, and other expensive infrastructure is already in place).
- nba456_ 10mo agoThe best indication that this isn't a bubble is all the people who would jump at the chance to buy more capacity if the price drops even a little.
- gtirloni 10mo agoOnly if they were buying GPU capacity.
- MangoToupe 10mo agoI'm sure this will be a nice consolation as the meaningful part of the economy collapses
- 999900000999 10mo ago
- MangoToupe 10mo ago> Data centers are becoming political flashpoints, primarily because of their impact on electricity prices. I'd bet anything that they know people are pissed the market has wildly misallocated capital and are trying to save face by framing it as a cost that directly impacts consumers. In reality, the fear is knowing that our investor class is really too dumb to handle the money we've stuck in a box called "the world's retirement funds" and handed to them.
- jennyholzer3 10mo ago"our investor class is really too dumb to handle the money we've stuck in a box called "the world's retirement funds" and handed to them." all it took was a chatbot that says "you're a genius"
- rcxdude 10mo agoHmmm, I don't think this is the average perception of it, though. In general people I've discussed this with are more enraged by the resource usage (whether from a price increase or environmental position) than the capital.
- delichon 10mo agoThey are building too many steam engines. It's a bubble that's going to pop and leave investors empty handed. There are only so many mines to pump water out of, mills to turn, textile machines to crank. And those industries have jumped on a bandwagon that they don't understand, and most will soon mostly revert to good old English laborers. His Majesty's subjects are starting to see the terrible environmental effects of burning so much more coal. As a prudent investor I now recommend a Sell for the stocks of the Boulton & Watt company.
- marcosdumay 10mo ago> They are building too many steam engines. It's a bubble that's going to pop and leave investors empty handed. What a great analogy. People building too many steam engines was one of the main factors that lead to the first world war.
- piker 10mo agoSounds interesting. Do you have a source for that?
- marcosdumay 10mo agoThe most famous steam engine bubble in the 19th Century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania Those popped all over Europe during the entire century, with the last one popping at the 1890s. For some reason, people focus only on this large one on the UK. Sources for how 19th Century imperialism had a lot of support from extend-and-pretend infrastructure bubbles are harder to search.
- delichon 10mo agoWell over a century after the commercialization of the Newcomen / Watt steam engines.
- rcxdude 10mo agoThis did pretty much happen with railways during the industrial revolution. Huge amount of money was invested into railway build-outs and most investors lost their money even though the result was useful in the long run (though only a subset of what was built).
- jacquesm 10mo agoThis data center boom is so reminiscent of the .com period. Suddenly everybody with two computers next to each other had a data center (usually in a closet somewhere, if you were lucky it was locked).
- eli 10mo agoI was working at a startup that was being acquired and as part of due diligence they sent someone to do a "walk through" of our "data center," which was tricky because it was in fact a small coat closet with 2 beige tower PCs stacked up in it.
- escapecharacter 10mo agoThe future of the economy is everyone owning 4 data centers
- kijin 10mo agoI actually wish I could round up every computer in my home, stick them in a 19-inch rack, and put that rack someplace where I can't hear it. That would be my "data center". It will be fed with a fat power cable and a nice fiber uplink, and it might even run some "AI" from time to time.
- franktankbank 10mo agoWhat about a single beefcake server that runs dumb terminals throughout your house with a lightweight shim between each device and server. Sexy monitors just sitting there quiet AF. Mega room for coffee cups and niknaks across the desk. Ports for days. This is my dream. I'd keep it by my feet so I could pet it and say good job.
- joquarky 10mo agoDo this before you reach your 40s, because ageism will put a damper on your disposable income. I once had plans like this...
- tmaly 10mo agoI am hoping things revert to the mean and by extension, the consumer chip prices revert.
- mentalgear 10mo agowith investors and hype, things regress to the extreme
- michaelteter 10mo agoMany of the crazy things we see happening today come from the same root problem: the wealth of humanity has increasingly been funneled into the hands of a few. These may be mostly companies rather than individuals, but they are a proxy for a relatively small few people. This glut of finances leaves those few with a problem: what to do with it? And since accumulation of wealth is the ultimate goal, FOMO encourages increasingly foolish decisions (or at least unsustainable ones). The housing crisis is one of the outcomes. This AI bubble is another. I'm sure if we look around, we can find other examples. If resources were more evenly distributed, we would see different regions and peoples doing more varied things which would be appropriate for their needs.
- amelius 10mo agoWe need a concentration of money in order to make progress. But yes, we should also make sure that everybody can benefit from it.
- GolfPopper 10mo ago>We need a concentration of money in order to make progress. ...in the concentration of money. "The handful of benevolent god-kings will be nice to people" is not a model for a decent future.
- amelius 10mo agoYou mean we need a stronger government?
- _DeadFred_ 10mo agoThe creators/thought leader of Capitalism all said it was a necessary part of having a functioning Capitalist system. So yes? Unless you want to change systems to something else?
- GolfPopper 10mo agoI mean that America would be better off with a government that discourages god-kings instead of enabling them.
- password54321 10mo ago2026 is going to be about going all in on automating software development. This is where the money is currently at as software developers need compute and what could justify all the data centers being built. It is much harder to convert students with limited money or people who don't care about accuracy or the highest end models as much in a lot of other fields. The thing most people even got excited about by the end of this year is obviously Claude Code. If they can solve software development the bubble may take longer than expected to burst.
- ambicapter 10mo ago> We will stay largely under the radar He says this and then publishes the letter on LinkedIn? What's the play?
- OutOfHere 10mo agoAbsurd. Datacenter requirements are only going up, and will continue to go up.
- tharmas 10mo agoElectricity supply is a bottleneck.
- morninglight 10mo agoA Data Center is a Crypto Miner in disguise. Understand that fact, and you understand the future.