[hedora]

And, with this, the economic contagion begins.

Before this step, we had non-existent money loaned to build datacenters powered by non-existent power infrastructure to support future load that will never exist, with guaranteed revenue from companies that do not, and will never be able to pay.

Previously, this was propped up with circular revenue and investment. Now it's going to be propped up by dismantling the US tech industry.

This does not end well.

[PeterStuer]

The future load might definitely exist, but will it at a sustainable pricepoint?

[Vespasian]

And will it be by 2030 or ten years later

[b112]

If it is 2030, compute and software will vastly reduce requirements.

Nvidia has so much cash for R&D. You can bet they now have immense optimization and improvements in the pipeline, but why would they release anything groundbreaking right now?

There are no real competitors on their heels. As Intel did for decades, they will likely dole out improvements, only when necessary to remain ahead.

By 2030, I expect 10x improvement. We're also seeing stunning optimizations in trained models.

I imagine desktops running many of these local by 2030, even phones.

Will we need even 1/10 the datacenters for LLM in 2030? Certainly, privacy concerns are a thing.

[k32k]

When I read this comment all I see is: LLM at the edge - or close to it - will become available. And whoever provides the best eco-system across digital lifestyle and business wins.

Oh... Apple? lol.

Well that'd be funny wouldn't it.

Oh and dont forget Apple got rid of its reliance on Intel too. No reason why this can't happen again.

[rvz]

Could not believe how almost no-one saw this [0]. It was quite obvious that companies like Apple that are prioritizing local inference and potentially training have already won the race to $0.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278371

[k32k]

I did lol. I can't speak for enterprise in totality, but I see a world where Apple is the dominant provider of products/services for consumer and SMB's.

Google's lack of investment in marketing, design and sales/distributions capabilities is going to hurt them badly. MSFT is no different in many respects - latching onto the investments in 'relationships' and 'switching cost' initiatives that have kept customers loyal to them.

Apple is in great shape.

[adventured]

There will be continued hyperscale AI in the datacenter for some use cases, and AI in the smartphone (or PC) for other use cases. It is guaranteed to split that way. Apple's remarkable capabilities around custom chips will enable it to continue to stay out in front in smartphones.

[k32k]

" It is guaranteed to split that way."

There's no guarantee whatsoever.

[intrasight]

Why "funny"? Seems obvious to me that Apple is going to provide LLM at the edge. Who else would besides Google?

[k32k]

Oh lets see.

They were ridiculed for being 'behind on AI'. They haven't spent a dime on investing in AI-related infrastructure and so on...

And yet, they could stand to be the biggest beneficiaries if not the only. Given that they have plenty of resources in reserve and they are buying back stock - enabling insiders to have a greater say on actions in the future.

[manwe150]

With 10x improvements, I expect we need 10x the data centers (Jevons paradox)

[raisedbyninjas]

Is Oracle's headcount mostly sales? Not exactly tech industry decimation.

[kjkjadksj]

Sales are probably the last job to go in the ai job apocalypse.

[vaylian]

Obligatory comic: https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/201...

But they are still a tech company. So it is likely that this will also affect tech workers.

[pipo234]

So glad to no longer be working for these clowns

[samiv]

https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic

[maxdo]

Tech industry in its shape is dead anyways. How many companies / startups work is just to visualize data with some charts to help understand a bit.

How may companies are just some custom data collectors

You can continue , we are at double pivot now. Code is a commodity. Not oracle db , but oracle business department for sure . You can build the same on the fly and curated.

At the same time to support old system you need 10x less people .

[rvz]

We will look back on this AI bubble 10 years later and see that alongside with the private credit market, the funding of data centers via dubious methods (circular financing, billions of dollars of loans / debt) on top of mass layoffs for the sake of so-called "AGI" to cover up the massive losses will cause a market crash beyond the tech industry.

It just takes a single surprise to shock the market into chaos. My timeline is before 2030.

[cmxch]

I just want to skip to the moment where we get affordable hardware again.

[bdangubic]

that is not much of a timeline and not much of a prediction. first you need to define what “crash” means in real terms. over the course of 4 years there will be market correction (especially after a bull run like we are on) so just saying “ai bubble, crash bla bla” is too lazy (although there are probably 10k+ such “predictions” on HN in the last say a year)

[SpicyLemonZest]

If you're looking for a short term prediction, I expect with, let's say 80% confidence, that the OpenAI IPO later this year will be quietly cancelled or face a WeWork moment and be loudly cancelled. Too much of what we think we know about the economics of modern AI is built on trust in people who aren't trustworthy, and the presumption that VCs would check the financials carefully when we know they strap on blinders once they see a revenue graph they like.

[k32k]

My feeling is that some event will happen close-to-IPO that spooks investors, that results in OAI not IPO'ing. Remember if there are under-writers involved they will not want to go forward.

Then they will face financial distress, and questions over how they get the funding to continue as a going-concern. The only way that'll happen is via issues of shares at a lower price aka destroying the valuation of OAI compared with today.

Anthropic in comparison will be OK, as they have focused on building a viable business enterprise.

[bdangubic]

OpenAI (which is not a publicly traded company) will cause a market crash if they do not IPO or have lackluster IPO?

[SpicyLemonZest]

Only in the same sense that Lehman collapsing caused the 2008 crash. Nothing is monocausal, and crashes rarely happen all at once, but I expect it to be a big “uh oh” moment for investors.

[bdangubic]

Lehman was a huge part of US economy at the time it collapsed, OpenAI is a private company...

[adventured]

Your response is over the top. Oracle isn't going to fire 30,000 employees to fund anything.

That's the story for Wall Street. Oracle went on a huge run in the market, that it did not deserve, and they're going to attempt to hold on to as much of that gain as they can. Wall Street will applaud slashing jobs if you can give them a good reason for it (and sometimes with no reason at all).

Amazon, Meta, Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google are producing $700+ billion per year in op income. They have nothing else to spend it on. They will continue to fund a gigantic AI build out.

It does end well eventually, just as the dotcom era build-out ended well over the following decades. It ends with continued US dominance. Yes, the dotcom era saw a crash. The build out continued.

Browsers? The US won.

Ecommerce? The US and China won.

Search? The US won. China didn't win the search war, Baidu was supposed to be a serious global challenger to Google, that was widely hailed across tech circles as a known fact - it was inevitable. Nope. Google won. And Europe never did field a competitor at all.

China didn't win the smartphone war. Apple and Google won globally. Apple has produced trillions of dollars in profit on the back of that fact.

Cloud? China didn't even come close globally. The US won without any challenge at all. Europe never showed up. But but but Hetzner.

China didn't win the GPU war. Nvidia has the market, at least for this decade. That will produce over one trillion dollars in profit in just the next five or six years.

China didn't win the AI war. It was OpenAI's ChatGPT that shocked the world and set everything in motion. Now the US has the top three models in GPT, Gemini and Claude. Europe? Not even in the running (although they'd like to believe they are).

This all ends with the US remaining on top, with China as its only real peer.

Europe? There is no Europe in the equation, just as there wasn't for cloud or mobile apps or smartphones or personal computing.

[emilsedgh]

Who cares about US vs. China. We're talking about jobs here and economy.

[shimman]

The death merchants need a new enemy to justify their existence otherwise we might start cooperating with China where both countries could prosper with massive clean energy infrastructure.

[Saline9515]

US tech jobs are paid x2 to x3 more than most chinese or european equivalents.

[joquarky]

If you can get one. I'd even take 1x at this point.

I've been in this industry for >30 years and it's dead.

[righthand]

Continued US dominance in what? Slightly better/faster Llms? What is that going to help us achieve? Better propaganda?

[ericfr11]

What is this obsession with winning? Are you so scared?

[hackable_sand]

Scared or insecure

[kjkjadksj]

I could not care less what nation the oligarchy I am beholden to lives in. Same end result for me in either case.

[general_reveal]

No.

At a national security level, the department of defense has already war-gamed mass unemployment. The defense sector would already have projected when the unemployment would happen and at what rate, I’m saying this to imply they had AI and judged its trajectory rather quickly awhile ago.

Data centers WILL happen, mass unemployment WILL happen, simply because, smarter people made it, assessed it, cannot deny it, and a large scale paradigm shift is occurring.

The data centers WILL get built (because the country needs it, don’t worry about why), AND you WILL get fired. Please await further instructions, thank you.

Try to stay in the same spot, oh, Covid helped with that remote work thing huh? See, this won’t be as painful as everyone thinks, it’s a nice smooth transition.

Edit:

I just want to add, the DoD is not going to let tech companies control the infrastructure of data centers either, too much of a security risk. So yeah, you better believe secret govt money is going to finance all of it, just like highways.

You’re welcome, now you don’t have to speculate.

[batshit_beaver]

https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...

[joquarky]

Who will make use of all the servers in the data centers when very few people have any disposable income?

Edit: and how will these data centers be protected from people rioting against them because they can't afford bread?

[general_reveal]

Americans will use the data centers.

Bread and refreshments will be provided, borders will be closed. Planning will be around de-population, naturally, aging will take care of it. Then the economy will settle into what America really needs to become, a small European nation with nukes.

:) Cheers.