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?
I asked a chatbot that question a few months ago when I was trying them out. It came up with lots of bullshit ideas that make no sense to me, and one genuine use for some of that surplus data centre capacity: Scientific computing. Physics, astronomy, climate simulations, that sort of thing.
Aside from that maybe when all the big AI companies go bust their assets will be bought up by new operators who will continue to flood the market with cheap generative AI, without the burden of having to pretend that it’s possible to pay off all the debt incurred in building it. There are only so many high-energy physics simulations it’s worth doing and having that many GPUs is not really useful for much else that anyone’s discovered so far.
According to the Internet though it is said that the useful lifespan of a big Nvidia data centre GPU is something like 5-10 years, so it won’t be a problem for long.