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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

  So yeah, I am pretty sure that if that's the sentiment from software people at the major-major financial company, Coreweave is cooked.

The ironic thing is, your friend is still trying to get compute, which by all indications is still extremely scarce.

So there seems to be a huge mismatch: demand hasn't waned, but the narrative around AI has changed in the last month.

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There is no secret about the mismatch. Voters last week have elected people who are openly hostile to datacenters, and for some of them hostile to AI outright. The demand is there (at what price is a longer term debate). But if you can't power on new datacenters this doesn't do any good.

To give you an idea of the scale. US has currently about 50 GW of DC online. Depending on the source, you are looking at between 60 GW and 400 GW of new DC currently planned. For reference the total dependable capacity of the US grid is around 1000 GW.

I think there is a scenario where compute cost sky rockets while chip prices crash, as they end up unused in warehouse because of the lack of power and DC capacity.

AI has been passively hostile to society. VC cash has too. Non of that is irrational.

You want them to embrace a tech that exacerbates inequality and its founders promote that?

I don't see the previous poster saying they "want" anything.

Every civilizational advance “exacerbates inequality” because smart people can use it to become more productive, but dumb people can’t.

By that logic we should ban books. This is Boko Haram ideology and you are just a communist who thinks he should be protected from competition.

Instead of “making everyone well off“ here is what will actually happen, because that’s what happens every time communists seize power: everyone will get poorer, because they will be outcompeted by more sane jurisdictions, eg China.

Communists never waste a second on how wealth is actually created. To them, money just exists and the main problem is that isn't distributed evenly.

> what happens every time communists seize power: everyone will get poorer, because they will be outcompeted by more sane jurisdictions, eg China.

Chinese Communist Party, guide us to Capitalism?

If the communists can learn how to use markets, capitalists can learn how to redistribute. It's not impossible, we did it 100 years ago last time capitalism drunk-drove the world economy into a ditch, I just hope we can do it without a Great Depression and World War this time.

> Chinese Communist Party, guide us to Capitalism?

Yes please.

> capitalists can learn how to redistribute

By that measure, the West hasn't been capitalist since Roosevelt. Which would be accurate btw.

Does it exacerbates inequality? There's no question that some people are going to get rich, and they might be the wrong person and we should hate them. But prior to the advent of AI being able to generate video and audio, an aspiring film maker would have to slave away at a shitty job and claw their way to relevance in order to try and get Sony/whomever's attention, and the rich people would finance their movie dreams. Now with AI, that budding young artist can make a feature length film for a couple thousand dollars instead of having to beg Universal or Walt Disney for a hundred million dollars to make that movie.

Like, to me it's backwards.

There's the parable of the five monkeys. There are five monkeys in a cage with a ladder to bananas. When a monkey would climb the ladder to get a banana, the zoo keeper would spray all the monkeys. So they learn not to climb the ladder. Eventually. But then they replace the monkeys, one by one. when a new monkey tries to climb the ladder, the other monkeys stop them. Eventually, even though none of the monkeys currently in the cage has ever been sprayed, they still enforce the rule because, well, they don't know anymore.

In Hollywood, you have to earn your place. You can't just come in and make movies. Walt Disney would not stand for that. You have to spend decades learning first. AI weakens those technical and financial barriers, but people are gonna argue that you have to earn your place.

Yes. The nerds in SF openly discussed being part of the permanent underclass. These folks know what they're doing.

That sounds like “Threatening me with a good time”. It will be very cheap for me to buy my hardware. Unsurprisingly I have power at home, and I can use the free power I have during the day from solar to do all sorts of cool things on my own hardware. It will be like the 1980s and 90s again.

Data centers can be build in Mexico or in a different friendlier to AI jurisdiction.

Is Mexico stable enough to house very expensive and easily stolen GPUs (or whatever we call them now)?

Bytedance (China) is building a 40 Billion USD AI data center in Ceará, northeastern Brazil.

The world of private military companies (PMCs) is constantly expanding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_military_company

Perhaps rogue datacenters full of stolen GPUs will be the next cartel pivot after avocados, very cyberpunk

Canada is.

If democrats complete their movement to "ludditism" as a party, I will burn my DNC registration and work with the red team. Good timing since MAGA got spanked and should be on the way out.

I'm sympathetic to DSA types, right up until they call for bans on super intelligence, RSI, or data centers. Remember progressives, it wasn't "socialism" that lost me.

> Voters last week have elected people who are openly hostile to datacenters

Voters themselves were hostile towards data centers in all but one of the ballot initiatives (40 out of 41).

But the “elected people” you refer to (I assume Democrats) seem to me to be more about not having one-sided secret deals for data centers in folks’ “backyards”.

Specifically, the detailed stances seems to be for things like: cover energy demands (no rate hikes), no excess load on power grid, water protections, and transparency with the communities they are in. Some also call for more regulation (which is a knife that can cut both ways).

This seems reasonable to me.

If anyone wants to cast stones, I think targeting the folks currently in office who somehow thought it would be a good idea to defund extra power generation just because it happened to be renewables / clean energy might be one place to look.

That's a fantastic scenario. When the 5900s become cheap we'll all play with rolling our own data models.

Of course there is still demand for RAM and SIMD compute!

But also hoarding hardware in glorified warehouses is not the genius business idea everyone thinks it is.

Naturally; it should be hoarded in my glorified homelab, where I can more readily listen to the sweet purr of fans.

I'm assuming his friend's finance company is planning to make use of the cloud compute they find in some finance workload.

I don't think they're buying GPUs outright to store in a warehouse.

Any sort of hardware produced in the last 5 years has at least doubled in price. Some, like RAM are 3-5x more expensive.

So whoever hoarded it in warehouses could sell it now immediately for at least 100% profit.

They seem like geniuses to me now, worst case they make 100% profit on the investment.

It's only RAM, mass storage and GPUs. Desktop CPUs, mainboards, PSUs, and cases have become cheaper because PC building demand has declined. Peripheral prices have remained largely unchanged.

But a large reason for the price increase has been because companies have been hoarding them in warehouses as they wait for DC buildout. If you sell then you remove that pressure and prices decrease.

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