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Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers

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Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers

#51
post #37

Many 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.

If you are concentrating money in a way you exercise control of, then that money has been realized. If your 'concentration' of money is from loans on stocks, then those stocks value HAS BEEN REALIZED for your benefit, and you should be taxed on your REALIZED gains (you have benefited in the REAL world from the GAINS on your stocks value).

I don't have a problem with concentration of money. I have a problem with playing the game that the concentration of money doesn't actually exist yet and shouldn't be taxed.

Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers

#52

Many 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…

> FOMO encourages increasingly foolish decisions (or at least unsustainable ones)

Markets will punish them for poor investments. We have not seen that yet, but it is coming.

Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers

#53
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need a concentration of money in order to make progress. ...in the concentration of money. "The handful of benevolent god-kings will be nice to people" is not a model for a decent future.

You mean we need a stronger government?

The creators/thought leader of Capitalism all said it was a necessary part of having a functioning Capitalist system. So yes? Unless you want to change systems to something else?

Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers

#55
post #44
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It also happened with fiber during the dotcom boom. Years later, that came useful when everyone wanted YouTube in their pocket.

The bottleneck was the phone line running into individual houses. ie The "last mile" was a bottleneck. Dial-up. If you're old enough you will remember people connected to the internet via Dial-up, that is, their phone line. It was a bottleneck. It's data capacity was nowhere near what the fiber was.

Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. Your point is true and as such too I don't really think that they could really be used for semiconductor industry.

And all other industries also don't really seem to me to have any overlap with the datacenter industry as much aside from having water access and land and electricity but like I doubt that they would get used enough to be justified their costs, especially the costs of the overpriced GPU's and ram and other components

In my opinion, These large datacenters are usually a lost cause if the AI bubble bursts since they were created with such a strong focus of GPU's and other things and their whole model of demand is related to AI

If the bubble bursts, I think that auctioning server hardware might happen but I doubt how much of that would be non-gpu / pure compute related servers or perhaps gpu but good for the average consumer.

Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers

#57
post #17

Earlier 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…

> Don't these data centers have pretty elaborate cooling setups that use large volumes of water? Depending on where, and (more importantly) when you last read about this, there's been some developments. The original book that started this had a unit conversion error, and the reported numbers were off by about 4500x what the true numbers are (author claimed 1000 times more water than an entire city consumption, while…

I always find water use and farming weird. Living in part of planets where water for farms mostly if not fully rains down from the sky. So it getting on farm land is inconsequential one way or an other.

Still, I do feel there must be some difference between farming and cooling use by evaporation. As at least part of water is run off back to rivers and then seep back to ground water. These again depend largely on location.

Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers

#58
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future of the economy is everyone owning 4 data centers

I actually wish I could round up every computer in my home, stick them in a 19-inch rack, and put that rack someplace where I can't hear it. That would be my "data center". It will be fed with a fat power cable and a nice fiber uplink, and it might even run some "AI" from time to time.

What about a single beefcake server that runs dumb terminals throughout your house with a lightweight shim between each device and server. Sexy monitors just sitting there quiet AF. Mega room for coffee cups and niknaks across the desk. Ports for days. This is my dream. I'd keep it by my feet so I could pet it and say good job.

Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers

#59
post #5

If/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?

I wouldn't be sure. I think just like AI the crypto has been there due to excess liquidity. Thus when "wealth" gets cancelled the crypto will follow with it. I believe it will go down with rest of the markets.

Re: Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers

#60
post #55
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also happened with fiber during the dotcom boom. Years later, that came useful when everyone wanted YouTube in their pocket.

The bottleneck was the phone line running into individual houses. ie The "last mile" was a bottleneck. Dial-up. If you're old enough you will remember people connected to the internet via Dial-up, that is, their phone line. It was a bottleneck. It's data capacity was nowhere near what the fiber was.

But that buildout brought FTTN (cell towers, DSLAMs and DOCSIS) because loads was overinstalled in places that made little economic sense at the time.
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