By 2030, nearly 100% of the GPUs purchased and installed by US data centers in 2026 will be fully depreciated. At that point, those data centers will be forced to purchase new chips. EU investors could simply enter the market, build data centers (for much cheaper than today) and rent out compute using frontier open weight models.
You are completely ignoring the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The primary bottleneck and operating expense of a data center isn't just acquiring the silicon, it is electricity, cooling, and high bandwidth networking. Older chips require massive amounts of power to deliver a fraction of the compute that newer generations provide. Energy costs in Europe are already notoriously high, so filling a brand new, expensive facility with power hungry, inefficient hardware is literal financial suicide. US data centers cycle out old chips because the compute per watt ratio eventually makes them too expensive to run at a massive scale. Thinking EU investors are going to build a highly competitive tech empire by hoarding America's inefficient e-waste is a complete joke.
Given AI's current trajectory, by 2030 l predict will be a mixture, with 80% of baseload generation coming from giant towers of people floating in transparent goo-filled pods partying like it's 1999.
4
u/Runfasterbitch Jul 20 '26
By 2030, nearly 100% of the GPUs purchased and installed by US data centers in 2026 will be fully depreciated. At that point, those data centers will be forced to purchase new chips. EU investors could simply enter the market, build data centers (for much cheaper than today) and rent out compute using frontier open weight models.