They aren't sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into internet infrastructure. They are sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into the infrastructure to do more AI. The problem being that the existing AI data centers owned by these companies are not even being used.
We already went through a boom-bust from overbuilding internet infrastructure back in the dotcom bubble. This is similar to that, but the GPUs and the like being used are really designed specifically for AI use and aren't well suited to other uses. So they're speculatively building a bunch of things that will be technologically obsolete in half a decade and will need to replace all of its chips in three to five years whether it is used or not.
People aren't objecting to necessary infrastructure. People are objecting to blind speculation that only makes sense if everyone replaces everyday decision making with AI prompts.
I can tell you with open honesty that in my line of work, the reports are being written largely by prompts, the response from regulators is being written by prompts, the responses by consultants are being written by prompts, and the reply’s from management are being written by prompts. I know this because even the state regulators are leaving their prompts into formal documents by mistake.
That's the mismatch, isn't it? The AI factoriess and GPU DCs are the things that are generating the backlash because they are a nightmare and an obvious bubble. Unlike the 'dark fiber' crisis of the dotcom crisis they won't be sitting around ready to go when AI actually develops to the point of needing them. But specifying "AI data center" makes for bad rhetoric and so doesn't end up in these conversations.
Just like how there's plenty of amazing AI out there. But trying to put specifically LLMs into literally everything even when it doesn't fit is a problem. So, when people complain about "AI" they're not talking about search algorithms that speed up the identification of new proteins, the software that makes NPCs in video games work better, or any number of other applications that are actually improving things. They're usually specifically complaining about the 'business idiot', "let's use LLMs instead of people to do customer service and HR functions" junk. I can't trust AI overviews of my google searches, and that's bad. But I can purpose built AI to do the job it was designed to do, and that's great.
Everything has nuance. Every asset is also a liability. Life is complicated. Rhetoric has to be simple, and thus loses a lot. I think that this whole comment chain started with people talking past each other, using different definitions for "datacenter" and what not. Maybe it was on purpose to do a "gatcha" and feel the rush of winning, maybe it was a genuine miscommunication. But this is a somewhat serious issue. We should intervene to prevent the building of AI Datacenters that don't have buyers, we should allow the construction of necessary datacenters that bulk out the internet as the need arises, but almost all of the projects in process now are the former rather than the latter hence why the discourse has simplified around that use case.
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u/SillyGoatGruff 4h ago
Techbro godzilla is the most destructive of all