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  • Hacker News
  • 1. People fighting back due to never ending effects caused by these massive data centers

    2. Companies realising that they are burning half million to get nowhere

    3. Circular investment scaring investors

    4. And more recently, companies hiring people back coz the AI aimed to replace humans, created more problems than solved them

    5. Memory cartel falling apart, again, they did the same thing during 2000s

    6. China is making good ML free, supply and demand, destroying the US tech token business model

    7. Even META has too much computer power and no enough use for them.

    Those are the main reasons why AI buildout is not just slowing down but falling apart faster than expected.

    by h4kunamata
  • The primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity.

    The bottleneck for building some AI datacentres and switching them on is electricity, sure, but that's not what drives growth. There also needs to be demand for the additional capacity; people need to be waiting for capacity to catch up so they can do the useful work that grows [society|GDP|something] that they aren't doing right now.

    There's also very likely to be diminishing returns from additional capacity if we're near or over the limit of productive use. And there's the opportunity cost of what could have been done with that [money|land|electricity].

    This is a much more complicated system than "people say they need more AI -> build datacenter -> power datacenter -> magical growth!"

    by onion2k
  • Apparently they're fast tracking gas fired power plant approvals, so we can expect production to increase and the climate crisis to worsen. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/07/donald-trump-ep...
    by cdrnsf
  • I think at the very least, once the dust settles, a lot of these datacenters could become really really cool haunted houses, giant escape rooms, etc.

    The real "AI" success story will be the person that makes an IRL backrooms theme park in the husk of a datacenter.

    Or: laser tag park, the vests you wear are in part old tpu/gpu components.

    by beepbooptheory
  • Question for the experts: does the power crunch mean that AI hyperscalers will turn off previous generation GPU datacenters to free up power for their new Vera Rubin GPUs?
    by 9cb14c1ec0
  • Project Kilby is probably the most intelligent approach to this problem so far.

    https://www.chevron.com/newsroom/2026/q2/chevron-signs-20-ye...

    The idea is to bring the data centers, power generators and energy supply together in the ~same physical space so the only thing you have to transmit is data. Moving energy is way more expensive than moving information.

    by bob1029
  • Remember when we didn't have enough electricity for electric cars?
    by rconti
  • https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dIvV!,w_1456,c_limit...

    Of the items on this chart, I would say AI data centers are providing the least amount of value per % of GDP spent.

    And 1930s public works the highest.

    by jimbokun

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