Two days ago I talked to someone in water management about data centers. One of the big players wanted to build a center that consumed as much water as a medium town in semi arid bushland. A week before that it was a substation which would take a decade to source the transformers for. Before that it was buying closed down coal power plants.
I don't know if we're in a bubble for model capabilities, but we are definitely hitting the wall in terms of what the rest of the physical economy can provide.
You can't undo 50 years of deffered maintenance in three months.
Getting well funded commercial demand is exactly how you undo it.
Not in three months. It will take years if not decades.
What happens when OpenAI and friends go bust because China is drowning in spare grid capacity and releasing sota open weights models like R1 every other week?
Every company building infrastructure for AI also goes out of business and we are in a worse position than we are now because instead of having a tiny industry building infrastructure at a level required to replace what has reached end of life we have nothing.