alt Hacker Newsthere's a big difference between now and then. we built up capacity. dark fiber. and couldn't use until we got broadband. In general. ai capacity is being used right now today.
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That’s not exactly true, a lot of GPUs are sitting in warehouses because they are lacking prerequisites to being installed, in some cases this is even just power.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers-in-n...
That’s one big difference. The other big difference is that capital back then was mainly spent by startups with no or little traction.
Today, the "old" corporations like google, meta, amazon are also spending a lot of money.
This does not seem to be the case. The very first VeraRubin NVL72 systems are barely installed and won't be running real workloads until beginning of '27. Colossus II appears to be the largest user of Blackwell Ultra NVL72s and those are also only recently on-line in September of this year with the remaining 3/4 of them not until end of the year. The delays in datacenter deployment are very long. Even their GB200s didn't come on-line until January of '26. Hopper H100/200s still dominate.
The other hyperscalers are even further delayed. CoreWeave has some VeraRubin, but not in volume (as I understand).
We’re doing a similar thing now too, building tons of extra power capacity and links to data centers.
After the crash no one will need to build a new data center for 20 years, and there will be plentiful power connections
> ai capacity is being used right now today.
A lot of its current use is just basic questions that could be handled by local llms just as well, yet they are being processed on GB200s on the other side of the world.
> In general. ai capacity is being used right now today.
Not according to this article[1], which says:
"I believe we are now in an inevitable overbuild situation, one with no neat, tidy Dot-Com Bubble-style exit story. Demand for NVIDIA GPUs — and those from Broadcom, AMD and other semiconductor companies — is driven by speculative capital believing that the AI industry will become magnitudes larger than it is today, largely driven by the fact that everybody believes there’s far more demand for compute capacity than actually exists. ... NVIDIA has created a remarkable illusion perpetuated by the media — that GPU sales are a direct measurement of the actual demand for AI compute, rather than a measurement of how a few companies are willing to invest in an idea two years in advance, using circular financing as a means of creating the sense that you must buy these GPUs now, or you’ll miss out on the future. ... At the very least, hyperscalers are going to be burdened with brutal depreciation charges or onerous write-offs for years to come, whether their capacity turns into revenue or not. ... I don’t see how 90%+ of NVIDIA’s sales ever end up generating a single dollar of revenue, and considering the amount of project financing-backed data center debt deals, there’s very little that exists to protect investors if AI compute demand never arrives."
[1] - https://www.wheresyoured.at/wherere-all-the-ai-chips/