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mncharity | on: I'm not convinced the AI bubble exists
> Railroads, semiconductors, plastics, networking... the utility was there for all of them, and so was the potential profit.

Canals... where a repeating pattern was the company underestimating difficulty/costs, and going unrecoverably into debt. Another company, which then bought the largely finished canal, cheap, they had potential profit... until tech change (railroads).

thelastgallon | parent | next
> Another company, which then bought the largely finished canal, cheap, they had potential profit... until tech change (railroads).

Absolutely right. Somebody may buy the DCs. The tech changes very very fast, the DCs may be entirely worthless. US has high energy costs, it can never be cost competitive.

Why Data Centres Will Change the World and Bankrupt Their Builders — John Hempton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY5YyPLfqp0

Useful (like solar, airlines, fiber), but it won't be profitable. High capital cost, low marginal cost, subject to competition and with technical improvement --> these four factors guarantee businesses will never be profitable, and they go bust.

onlyrealcuzzo | root | parent | next
> US has high energy costs, it can never be cost competitive.

A non-trivial percentage of that is artificial.

When push comes to shove and enormous profits (and anything remotely resembling national security) are at stake, the US is decent at removing artificial problems.

You've already seen a ton of that related to chips and data center build outs.

Why is solar more expensive in the US than China? Mainly tariffs. Same for batteries.

Why is nuclear more expensive in the US than South Korea? The government.

Why is SMR never going to beat conventional nuclear if you remove artificial problems? Physics. Though specialized applications will be viable with SMR.

arethuza | root | parent | next
The UK has even higher energy costs and people seem to want to build data centers here? (Or at least they say they do - looks more like land speculation to me):

https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/map/electricity_industria...

venzaspa | root | parent | next
The UK has got a huge amount of wind power that can be purchased ahead of time at better rates than listed in that table, it's also got some bottlenecks with power distribution (especially between Scotland and the rest of the UK) which will take years to fix so there area areas where decent power contracts can be had for customers who can build out fairly quickly (datacentre operators with large power requirements).
idiotsecant | root | parent | next
The UK has way less cheap wind than the US has cheap hydro. Let alone cheap solar.
arethuza | root | parent
"The UK has got a huge amount of wind power"

Very little wind today here in Scotland and for most of this week - which is a pleasant change I guess...

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Silhouette | root | parent | next
The reality here in the UK does not always match the ambition though.

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/microsoft-pul...

Both our high energy prices and the current capabilities of our energy distribution network relative to the renewable generation and storage capacity we are trying to move towards are significant barriers.

thelastgallon | root | parent | next
People want to do all kinds of idiotic things which make no sense. We've had excess compute/gpu since 2010. People didn't know what do with all that excess and started bitcoin and tens of thousands of crypto, followed by NFT. The claim was crypto will solve all problems, which hasn't happened. Now, everyone moved on to AI, AI will do this, that and everything else and also take away all your white collar and creative jobs.

Even third world countries like India which can't provide basic services to their citizens, have no water, no power, no sanitation or cleanliness are giving hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives (land, power, water, tax subsidies) to hyperscalers, to create at most 2.6 jobs. Google clearing land to build India's largest data centre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBJPf6Pxfvs

> The UK has even higher energy costs and people seem to want to build data centers here? (Or at least they say they do - looks more like land speculation to me):

There is no meaning to what politicians and crony capitalists do. It is all lies, theft and grift.

The island where residents fight data centres for water: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuToaVyWmL4

expedition32 | root | parent
Because European countries are politically stable and are under the rule of law. Things that are rather priceless and can't be bought with money.

Those drones hitting high-rise hotels in Dubai were rather eye opening.

bigfudge | root | parent | next
I agree with your point about rule of law, but let’s not gloat too quickly about nasty SA getting its comeuppance. It’s going to look pretty ugly in Europe when Russia follows through on its potential to disrupt or destroy critical infrastructure. We are pretty vulnerable too.
red-iron-pine | root | parent
the UK is stable? economically it's falling pretty hard and the governments seem to be a revolving door
dr_dshiv | root | parent
“When the dot-com bubble happened, it was largely driven by companies that couldn't turn a profit or had P/E ratios in the hundreds. I'm not going to pretend that I'm an expert on financial bubbles, but I've never heard of a bubble where the companies involved had such a modest valuation based on their earnings, even if their earnings (and therefore their evaluations) are enormous.”

Do you know the situation with rail, canals, etc?

etiennebausson | root | parent
Railroads had some of the same issue encountered by the dotcom bubble, and in particular dark fiber: Overcapacity.

Once railroads where demonstrated to be (extremely) profitable, people kept building them even if the existing demand was already met. The exact same thing happened with dark fiber (looking at you Enron).

AI is a bit different in the sense that the capacity can be used for research, and more importantly is not bound to a specific connection (between locations), and therefore a lot more fungible.

Not sure about canals, but while I think there are issue with current AI investments, I would not conflate them with the railroad bubble on this basis.

pydry | root | parent
AI is a bit different in that unlike the rail tracks and the dark fiber the data centers arent actually going to be finished. It's much more of a stranded asset - there will be piles of chips and 1/4 finished construction projects, not usable assets.

No doubt somebody will use the assets for something but it's still wildly more wasteful than either railroads or dark fiber.

dcrazy | root | parent
You don’t think there were half-finished rail lines abandoned when the companies ran out of money?
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timr | parent | next
Also, (setting aside Standard Oil’s business practices), this is a common meme in oil exploration historically, and even today. Early prospectors were honestly pretty stupid, and their principal differentiation was risk tolerance.

There a lot of parallels with AI…it doesn’t take a genius to see the long-term potential, but the risk is in implementation, so it’s a mad rush to the finish line by a wide variety of less scrupulous early players. Rockefeller got his big start by sweeping up failing producers who were all capital weak, and I’m sure something similar will happen here during the inevitable bust.

I can do the hard, risky work of drilling wells / deploying AI, or I can sell you a vision of that future, today. The most dangerous technologies in terms of grifting are the ones that everyone can understand.

e12e | parent | next
I'm reminded of vertical hydroponic farming in old silicone fabs in Japan...

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2026/07/09/companies/p...

jacquesm | parent | next
Restaurants and bars!

This pattern repeats across many industries with large up-front costs.