this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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It would be interesting to know how many resources this growth has taken from others places...
As for now it don't seems that AI has generated a profit for the companies that bring it to the market and it seems it will not do it even in the near future, so I assume the question is: how many years can your economy be sustained by a sector that is not generating any revenue and is absorbing a monstrous amount of resources ?
We are not talking about a single company (like Amazon back at the time), do you really think that even when Ai will start (if ever) to generate profits these will be able to repay all the investements done today ?
First, actual investments that have been done are relatively modest. It's still a substantial portion of TSMC fab capacity. All of the deal announcements for datacenters are 50x-100x growth. I doubt all of this capacity will be built for a long time. Coding/reasoning models can have more demand, but openAI (most of the deal announcements) is not that good at those. 100x power growth is also 200x every 2 years token output growth, and if models get better, users need less tokens by getting it right on fewer tries.
Second, they are losing money at current levels. Oracle leaked it lost $100m on existing AI datacenter operating losses. Coreweave is fully levered at 10% interest rates. Everyone is operating like social media startups from 10-20 years ago. Only revenue growth and market share, and being cool, matters. Enshittification will come much later.
Third, datacenters are fundamentally flawed, and local AI has competitive advantage to them. AI is good at datamining the datacenter traffic for output that could be profitable to steal.
Fourth, the only business model is US military and disinformation control. They will pay infinitity, and support infinity investment. Giant datacenters are about Skynet. Not market profits. That US government would protect their oligarch partners in stealing your ideas/llm outputs, and amplify current media's messaging that anti-genocide views are treasonous anti-American sentiment.
If all the money goes towards skynet, energy bills for everyone else will go up, including what little manufacturers there are in US. Insisting on war on China and Russia is helped by forced unemployment, and fascist response to the unemployed's uppityness. Datacenter AI's primary certain value is as a new cold war Arms and disinformation race.
FWIW, part of the OpenAI investment process is signing something to say that you understand that you’re unlikely to get any return on your investment and that you consider it more akin to a donation
I would think that this warning, in a way or another, is true in every kind of investment, even my bank's personal investment have something like it.
Not framed like that. You have to acknowledge that investments can depreciate rather than appreciate and that you may lose your money, sure. That’s very different to saying that you acknowledge that you probably will lose your money and that you consider your investment a donation.
I think that this is just a technical difference based on what you are investing into.
A personal bank's investement is a different thing than a investement in a startup, with different level of risks and revenue.
VCs typically want a return on their investments
With a bank investement I get something back, even if less than what I invested. Could OpenAI pay back even half of what received ?
Which send us back to the starting point: what will happen when the VCs will start to ask for their money back or for their share of the revenue ? Inevitably the bubble will pop.