this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2026
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[–] CannonFodder@lemmy.world 10 points 13 hours ago (5 children)

Prolly not. When the bubble pops these data centers will be sold off for cents on the dollar and a bunch of the companies go bankrupt. There will be a glut of equipment, so prices will fall. People will buy up the scraps and provide compute services cheaper.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 points 59 minutes ago

Maybe, but that's temporary. The hardware has to be replaced after failures at minimum, if not sooner to upgrade. Yeah, there will be a period where the hardware may be cheaper, but the prices won't stay at that floor forever (though they obviously also won't be at the insane inflated prices of today).

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago

Unlikely. They said that during the bitcoin and blockchain bubble too, and that didn't pop, it just deflated and everything got moved over to AI. AI is starting to deflate, but there will be a new bubble.

[–] BremboTheFourth@piefed.ca 21 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

You're more optimistic than I am. My bet is that when the bubble pops the government will step in to bail out these companies, especially household names like Nvidia, and none of the data center equipment ever finds its way into the hands of regular people. It's gonna get repurposed into a pillar of our surveillance hellscape, attempting to weed out people who are guilty of precrimes or thoughtcrimes, providing pretext to arrest political opponents and undesirables by going "they were dangerous! Our trillion dollar AI said so!"

[–] ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 13 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Nvidia is the one selling the shovels during the gold rush. They're not at risk of going bust.

It's all the LLm companies leveraging themselves to the eye balls to buy Nvidia chips for their datacenters that are at risk.

[–] Instigate@aussie.zone 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Haven’t they invested like $100 billion or so in LLM companies though? I thought they were a big player in the Enron-esque cyclical investment scam they’re all running. Will be tough for them if they can’t recoup any of that.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 hours ago

They've made several hundred billion off it though. Spending 100 billion to keep the hype train going is peanuts if it's making you over 100 billion a year in high-margin extra revenue.

And much of that investment has been promises of future servers, etc. A lot of deals with dollar values attached to them take place with not nearly as many dollars changing hands.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 3 points 8 hours ago

It’s gonna get repurposed into a pillar of our surveillance hellscape, attempting to weed out people who are guilty of precrimes or thoughtcrimes

You've created an entire narrative around this. That's impressive.

[–] addie@feddit.uk 0 points 6 hours ago

As regards the data centre equipment; the SSDs and hard drives used for storage would be reusable by regular people. Those will be nice to have.

The memory is the high-bandwidth kind that is not be usable on consumer motherboards. The 'graphics cards' are the size of filling cabinets, require external power supplies and cooling, don't have video outputs, don't have drivers for graphics output. If you don't have a requirement for serious parallel computation with a very high uptime, then it's not worth the cost of powering them up. If/when the bubble bursts, all that shit is going to landfill.

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 9 hours ago

The number of AI datacenters that are actually datacenters and not just fields of gravel is low.

[–] dan1101@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago

We could use a skate park