Part of me feels the fact that EVERYONE is saying that there’s a huge AI bubble makes me wonder if there’s actually a possibility there isn’t an AI bubble. Because I was around for the dot com and GFC bubbles and no one (not really) saw those coming. Also, China is pretty much doing everything right these days, and they seem to believe in AI too.
And I’m not against AI in any and all forms. Like, I think there’s huge potential in translating foreign languages. I think it would be cool if people could talk in their native languages but have AI translate things perfectly - which I understand is something AI can do. There are some simple functions in my job (like searching through and summarizing things from our very massive list of policies). But even thinking about the absolute best case scenarios for AI, I can see how the current expectations are even close to what the reality can be.
So what is the argument that we’re not in a bubble, even if we don’t actually believe it?
that companies building datacenters don’t invent new money to do it, they have nuts amount of free cashflow. Stock market could crash (crash as in related to overevaluation) without job losses, like in 2019.
datacenters footprint on jobs in minimal, they employ like 500 people in giant piece of shit warehouse. rn they employ construction worker/induce electricity demand as well, but that’s whatever.
it could only propagate into real economy if they decide to raise their own price (or via electricity prices), increasing bills of all b2b saas types, and induce inflation spiral right as fed lowers rates.
e.g. painless exit is like nvidia collapses 3-5 times in evaluation, new datacenters stop being built, google still prints money, just less so cause amortization is a motherfucker.
Closer to 50 people than 500
but for real, even those giant projects are still 20-50 people? i would assume they’ll have to have plumbers/hvac/other guys doing stuff constantly, cause gpu farms are not like storage sites.
Actually now that you point out the higher needs of an AI datacenter it may be different
You’ve got to remember that if the holy line goes down, all companies must tithe a blood sacrifice to restore its sacred vigor and ensure it rises once more. It’s a team effort, you know, the only form of solidarity that’s legal in hellworld.
i mean kinda but not really?
they are not doing stocks for loans schemes, thus banks are not exposed (piddly 10s of billions of openai/anthropic is whatever for something like goldman), the construction industry eating shit anyways in home market. Like 2008 was cataclysmic cause both giant industry imploded, people lose homes, thus stopped buying durable treats, so it was shit on all fronts. Here like 50k people lose their jobs and jenson becomes sad.
stockmarket crash could somehow wipe savings of whole genz in robinhood, and freezes consumption that way, but that’s solvable with endless qe as wellm as it’s not real economy. for real economy to crash, the top quintile/decile have to stop to consume, for some reason.