> We will stay largely under the radar
He says this and then publishes the letter on LinkedIn? What's the play?
Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers
31–40 of 75 posts
Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers
#32Axios hijacks the back button. The TLDR is: we’re building too much speculative capacity and the “if we build it, they will come” assumption will be proven wrong.
Yeah annoying. Need to find an extension to fix that.
Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers
#33If/when the AI bubble pops and we're left with hundreds of underutilized datacenters, I think this could be good for hosting customers by driving prices down across the board. Maybe it will make self-hosting even more cheaper than public clouds.
The overlap between the datacenter needs of AI and those of crypto are hard to miss. If/when the AI bubble pops I'd be willing to bet that we see another crypto surge.
I can't be the only one who's noticed that the volume of crypto stuff being pushed slowed as the AI fervor ramped up?
Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers
#34This data center boom is so reminiscent of the .com period. Suddenly everybody with two computers next to each other had a data center (usually in a closet somewhere, if you were lucky it was locked).
I was working at a startup that was being acquired and as part of due diligence they sent someone to do a "walk through" of our "data center," which was tricky because it was in fact a small coat closet with 2 beige tower PCs stacked up in it.
Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such bad behavior on the back button - it’s such a shabby trick, and makes me think less of any site that pulls that.
I always think about the developers who were asked to implement something like this
It's always a bug. Usually, some issue with an iframe navigating to another html page, which makes the back button go back in the iframe instead of the page itself. This usually happens because of an ad, which makes me wonder why people are still navigating without ad blockers.
Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't these data centers have pretty elaborate cooling setups that use large volumes of water? So they're sitting on real estate with access to massive amounts of water, electricity, and high bandwidth network connections. Seems like that combination of resources could be useful for a lot of other things beyond just data centers. Like you could probably run desalination plants, large scale hydroponic farms, semicondu…
Semiconductor manufacturing might make sense here but I also don't think it might not simply because it would require probably a lot of expertise and knowledge and complex machinery with experience in this industry which I assume would be very hard to gather even for these datacenters. I don't see any reasonable path moving forward for these datacenters for the amount of money that they have invested.
Semiconductor manufacturing needs supply chain a lot more than it needs fast internet. Wafers, fine chemicals, gases, consumable parts. A lot of this comes from petroleum refining, so it helps to be near a lot of refineries, although not enough to be decisive in site selection.
Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers
#37Many of the crazy things we see happening today come from the same root problem: the wealth of humanity has increasingly been funneled into the hands of a few. These may be mostly companies rather than individuals, but they are a proxy for a relatively small few people. This glut of finances leaves those few with a problem: what to do with it? And since accumulation of wealth is the ultimate goal , FOMO encourages in…
We need a concentration of money in order to make progress.
But yes, we should also make sure that everybody can benefit from it.
Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers
#38This data center boom is so reminiscent of the .com period. Suddenly everybody with two computers next to each other had a data center (usually in a closet somewhere, if you were lucky it was locked).
The future of the economy is everyone owning 4 data centers
Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers
#39If/when the AI bubble pops and we're left with hundreds of underutilized datacenters, I think this could be good for hosting customers by driving prices down across the board. Maybe it will make self-hosting even more cheaper than public clouds.
Don't these data centers have pretty elaborate cooling setups that use large volumes of water? So they're sitting on real estate with access to massive amounts of water, electricity, and high bandwidth network connections. Seems like that combination of resources could be useful for a lot of other things beyond just data centers. Like you could probably run desalination plants, large scale hydroponic farms, semicondu…
Water usage of the DC itself can vary a lot. If they're in an area where clean water is cheap, then they might use evaporative cooling which probably has the most significant water consumption (by volume and the fact that it's been processed to be safe to drink). In other areas they may use non-potable water or just a closed loop water system where the water usage is pretty negligible. The electricity is going to be the much larger consideration on the larger scale (though still affected by local grid capacity). Also, the capital cost is a very significant part of these systems: there's a pretty big gap in pricing between 'worth building' and 'worth keeping running'.
(I recommend this video by Hank Green on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc . Water usage of data centers is a complex and quite localized concern, not something that's going to be a constant across every deployment)
Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers
#40They are building too many steam engines. It's a bubble that's going to pop and leave investors empty handed. There are only so many mines to pump water out of, mills to turn, textile machines to crank. And those industries have jumped on a bandwagon that they don't understand, and most will soon mostly revert to good old English laborers. His Majesty's subjects are starting to see the terrible environmental effects…
This did pretty much happen with railways during the industrial revolution. Huge amount of money was invested into railway build-outs and most investors lost their money even though the result was useful in the long run (though only a subset of what was built).