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by bArray 27 days ago
I'm not sure why you were downvoted, your point is well made.

> Too many people seem to believe that the AI bubble popping means something like "the total volume of the activity will precipitously drop and whole centers will be abandoned forever".

I think that many of them will fail. We have several data centers being built nearby to me, where the UK has some of the highest energy prices. I don't know how AI companies can make it make economic sense, let alone any normally operating company (like a Cloud service provider).

> I don't believe that. I was an adult when the dot-com bubble popped. What happened then was that a lot of unsound businesses went under, and the healthier players (like Amazon) expanded into the resulting void. Ultimately, the relentless march of digital technology didn't even slow down back then, although the inflow of risk capital definitely did. But the existing resources were mostly taken over by someone else.

I think the difference between this and the dot-com crash is enormous. Every part of our economy is now entangled in this. A significant part of the US's GDP is based on the idea that Nvidia can keep expanding their market cap past several Western nations. Your pension likely has large buy-ins on the AI hype. Everybody at every level is very exposed to this.

> If/when the current bubble bursts, it will be similar. All that infrastructure will be resold and re-rented to healthier players. By now, machine learning has reached a level of usability/maturity which is genuinely useful and the economy at large won't abandon it any more than it abandoned e-mail or WWW back then.

I have my doubts that anybody will be liquid enough to buy what remains at reasonable prices. And the impact of that is obvious, why buy RAM from Micron when LLM Corp are selling it for 50% of retail value?