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No datacenter needed now, just run it on your computer. Anything with 12gb+ of vram can run it comfortably at low quants. If they can come out with a good MOE model it will crush the competition. At this current rate of progress, China will out-compete foreign AI development within a year or two.
The big tech companies have more money than God and have had historically high revenue growth for decades. They achieve that high growth rate by re-investing that giant stream of money into more growth. Their stocks are entirely valued on that high growth rate - for whatever reason, growth is valued more than dividends in the current stock market climate. But they've basically saturated their markets - Google can't spend more money to make more people use search, Facebook can't spend more money to make more people use social media, approximately everybody with an internet connection is already using those. They can't just sit on the money, because if they do, the expected thing is to pay a portion of it out to the shareholders as a dividend. But dividend stocks are valued less than growth stocks, so their stock price will tank, and the board (comprised of rich people who own a lot of that company's stock) don't want that to happen. So they need something else to spend the giant stream of cash on.
Data centers full of GPUs are the most expensive possible thing that a tech company could conceivably make a profit off of, so it solves the problem of what to do with the giant stream of cash. And the boards and investors are required to believe in it, because otherwise they're wasting the giant stream of cash.