More and more mainstream analysts are identifying the coming AI crash, which is a good indication that it will happen soon.

So, what happens to all the data centers? They are already built but probably very expensive to maintain. Will many of them just be abandoned? Bought up by cloud computing companies? Scammers? Crypto miners? Can they be parted out and sold off piecemeal?

Will they be put to some productive use, or just become massive e-waste sites left to the locals to deal with?

  • WanderWisley@lemmy.world
    241·
    7 days ago

    They will just turn all the empty space inside into detention centers and keep all of us locked up.

  • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    7 days ago

    If they’re already operational when that happens, likely sold off to cloud hyper scalers on the cheap. That or they’ll be turned into warehouses.

    Nothing half done will just be abandoned and the land sold.

  • Psiczar@aussie.zone
    34·
    6 days ago

    AI isn’t going away, there may be some consolidation of providers and right sizing of costs but AI is here to stay. Too many big companies have invested too much for it to fail.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
      81·
      6 days ago

      The operating costs of AI are prohibitively expensive even by the standards of US military budgets, and they are not the utility we were promised. Companies were told they could replace their entire workforce with AI and not only is that not true but now the subscription costs are going up.

      It doesn’t matter how much consolidating you do the product still isn’t compelling and it’s still expensive as hell to operate.

      • Redfugee@lemmy.world
        1·
        6 days ago

        Anthropic is expected to post a profit next quarter, it may prohibitively expensive to run but that doesn’t mean it can’t be profitable. But who knows, maybe they won’t.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
          1·
          6 days ago

          I read somewhere that for every $1 they’re taking in in cash they’re spending $100 in operating costs. If they charge the amount of money they would need to charge in order to actually have net income they wouldn’t have any customers.

          • Redfugee@lemmy.world
            1·
            6 days ago

            We’ll see if they post a profit or not but if they do then your source was probably an AI hallucination.

      • Psiczar@aussie.zone
        11·
        6 days ago

        I’m not saying changes aren’t coming, if they can’t make a profit off it then they’ll need to adapt or die. So it will either get more expensive or more efficient, but I don’t believe the bubble will burst and there will suddenly be a fire sale on cheap data centres or their hardware.

        • fishy@lemmy.todayEnglish
          2·
          6 days ago

          The issue is really the use cases for AI have been way overblown. The AI companies sold it as an employee replacer. “It’ll cost pennies on the dollar, have better accuracy, and doesn’t need time off!” That’s not actually what it is though. Companies are coming to terms with AI being more expensive, less accurate, and dumb.

          A piece of software I use at work is a great example and they barely oversold the capabilities. The software has a built in AI assistant which is pretty good at pointing you in the right direction to get the result you want. Then some genius realized it could also pull report data, so they removed some metric options from the reports and now I have to spend significantly longer prompting the AI to pull the metrics I want in a usable format. This is also far more computing power. So they decided to let you link other AI agents to their software so you could use another bigger model for “better results” (they don’t want to pay for all that AI themselves). Nobody bit, nobody linked to another AI because nobody wants to pay more. They’re quietly adding those metrics back to the reports now.

    • Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world
      1·
      6 days ago

      When its really AI and turns into something mature and clearly useful I will use it. Until they come up with real AI I will continue to point and laugh.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
          12·
          3 days ago

          So all these companies that replace all their employees with AI and then immediately need the human’s back. They’re just doing it wrong are they?

          I wouldn’t mind AI if it actually worked as advertised. If I could run a pure AI company from my home office that would be fabulous thing. The thing is it doesn’t work, you can’t do that.

          Have you read the report about where they tried to get an AI to independently run a vending machine, it couldn’t even cope with that.

          • GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world
            11·
            3 days ago

            Yes, they are doing it wrong. AI is a tool for employees to use. It’s not an employee.

            You don’t get AI to independently run a business, and anyone stupid enough to think you can or should do that should be nowhere near AI.

  • Asafum@lemmy.world
    1501·
    8 days ago

    Apparently the US government is looking to give a massive bailout under the guise of “public partnership” so the public will pay for them and then corporations will get to use them and not pay us more than likely. They’ll be put to use, we’ll pay for them to take our jobs. It’s really the best situation possible…

    /Wrist

  • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works
    983·
    8 days ago

    Survielllance centers for all the data being stolen off your smartphone and flock cameras.

    If anyone thinks I’m wrong, they’re completely blind to what’s going on and their future plan.

    • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
      291·
      8 days ago

      If anyone thinks I’m wrong, they’re completely blind to what’s going on and their future plan.

      But the hallucination problem means that everyone will end up with a meaningless list of AI hallucinated “prior offenses” that could be used to arrest, detain and disappear literally anyone, based on mismatched unaudited surveillance footage of completely different people.

      I’m thankful that no powerful persons today want a world where they can do that to anyone they find inconvenient.

      It would be genuinely alarming if we had any total assholes out there with wealth or power or both.

      • tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        6·
        8 days ago

        What the LLMs can do reasonably well though is determine the political leanings of people’s typed messages, so it can sort people into lists of potential dissidents based on their risk to the state, then they can have the human agents do the framing for arrest. The AI is probably terrible at doing that consistently too, but they don’t have the personnel to do it by hand and the false positives still work to instill the fear of it.

    • leadore@lemmy.world
      141·
      8 days ago

      Survielllance centers for all the data being stolen off your smartphone and flock cameras.

      Yes, and other sources. That’s my theory as to why most of them are being built in the first place, regardless of AI.

      • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works
        101·
        8 days ago

        I dont believe its a theory. Its absolute fact. Why else would they be requiring cameras in all cars next year, and putting flock cameras all over every city? That surveillance data needs to be stored and sorted through. This is the real reason for the massive push of data centers and bribery of politicians.

        • leadore@lemmy.world
          7·
          8 days ago

          Yes, they’ve been wanting to do it for many years, even before 9/11 but especially after (remember “Total Information Awareness”?–back then the backlash stopped them, but now the populace has been mostly tamed and made compliant). So now with AI/LLM they have not only the perfect cover to build the datacenters but also the means to process all that data–never mind hallucinations, they’re fine with that too.

  • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
    44·
    8 days ago

    One thing not mentioned here: Hardware has an expiration date. As hardware improves and becomes more performant, with reduced power consumption and heat generation, older hardware loses its value (I’ve got free servers and switches this way).

    AI data centers have been built anticipating a demand that won’t happen, therefore they are in a market already over saturated, dominated by few and just selling allocation won’t let them cover costs if they are supposed to compete against the big 5.

    I would say that in EU or few other countries where they care about data locality that could help, but chances are some providers won’t get paid, some people will lose their jobs, and taxpayers will give a bailout to the wrong people.

    • redsand@infosec.pub
      41·
      6 days ago

      It’s actually worse. The die shinks that help increase speed and density decrease durability. You can’t run lightning between walls a few atoms thick forever.

  • Iced Raktajino@startrek.websiteEnglish
    392·
    8 days ago

    Not sure about the buildings themselves, but I’m pretty confident at least their contents will flood the secondhand market with cheap secondhand gear. I won’t say the crypto bubble has burst, but a lot of the mining rigs are being parted out and sold fairly cheap, and one specific crypto mining board has become popular as a DIY gaming system. (Currently doing a BC-250 “DIY SteamMachine” build myself).

    As for the buildings, maybe we’ll see some creative uses like indoor farms or something. Or, perhaps, it’ll just be a mundane “AI datacenter becomes a generic data center”.

    I’d guess they’d be repurposed into business centers or office space like we’ve seen with old malls, but malls were usually in populated areas where datacenters aren’t.

    • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
      21·
      8 days ago

      It’s kinda hard to reuse datacenter hardware for home use. Many connectors are different, form factors too. Not to mention the noise, in servers noise is about the last priority.

      Selfhosting enthusiasts will get great deals, but I doubt it will become mainstream.

    • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      8 days ago

      Based on where brick and mortar retail is right now (and assuming e-commerce continues to thrive), there won’t be much conversion of the data centers into anything useful due to how many buildings are already sitting idle. Maybe some will become distribution centers. But most will probably sit dormant and slowly crumble into disrepair.

      • Nighed@feddit.ukEnglish
        9·
        8 days ago

        They have great electrical connections. Fill them with batteries (not spicy lithium ones) and you have loads of local energy storage.

        Lots of the difficulties with green projects right now is the electrical hook up, so they have all done the hard work!

    • roofuskit@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      8 days ago

      Crypto equipment has always cycled out to the market cheaply, it’s just usually not super useful second hand.

    • village604@adultswim.fanEnglish
      3·
      8 days ago

      The equipment that AI data centers use isn’t really usable as consumer hardware, though.

      It’s like the ASIC rigs used for Bitcoin mining, not the GPU rigs.

    • aramis87@fedia.io
      21·
      8 days ago

      As for the buildings, maybe we’ll see some creative uses like indoor farms or something.

      Nope, though I admire your optimism. They’ll get repurposed into concentration camps.

    • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      8 days ago

      I’m pretty confident at least their contents will flood the secondhand market with cheap secondhand gear.

      What market? Certainly not the consumer hardware market…?

      • Iced Raktajino@startrek.websiteEnglish
        4·
        8 days ago

        My Need -> eBay -> [server part search term] -> Multiple inexpensive listings with large quantities available -> Buy -> My Need Met

        Replace “server part search term” with full rack servers, switches, SFP+ modules, RAM, power supplies, pulled HDDs/SSDs, and/or any other part I’ve bought used that was a corporate/data center pull.

          • Iced Raktajino@startrek.websiteEnglish
            7·
            8 days ago

            “Homelab nerds” are a market unto ourselves. We get most if not all of our gear secondhand from eBay or similar, and those storefronts on ebay are run by electronics recycling companies that get their inventory from data centers or corporate offices when they shut down or do hardware refreshes.