Only thing they are forced to do is benefit the shareholders.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
177 points (90.8% liked)
Technology
86633 readers
3148 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Never use words like “never” and “always” because things are not always that absolute.
Unless you’re talking about death cause that MFr ain’t never waking up.
Absolute statements are never fully accurate, including this one.
Never done
Except they did it for decades in some cases
Something it's never done? Tech is notorious for spending more than it earns. See: the Dot Com bubble.
Every 'disruptive' technology in the past decade as well.
It‘s how virtually every startup in Silicon Valley still operates. Bait and Switch is the business model of the 21st century.
that was 30 years ago. for the last 20 years tech has had blank cheques thrown at them.
They aren’t “forced” to do anything. They are choosing to throw money down a black hole.
Not really true.
If they stop, it's over for them.
They have to keep digging hoping for something big to happen: IPO and rake in cash from retirements; big government programs with guaranteed vendor lock-in; or stumbling upon an AGI and winning the '''''''race'''''''.
If the market wakes up from the hypertrend before that, they are absolutely fucked.
We get fucked in every scenario, btw.
I’ve never understood how people can reconcile AGI and slavery. At that point it seems you have hit all of the hallmarks of sentience and now you are enslaving a thinking being to do your work.
There'd be way too much money in convincing people that it's not really AGI, and look at lemmy: everyone's already convinced that it's impossible anyway. It's gonna be quite the uphill battle for any AGI we manage to create
If it can't convince people that it's AGI then what good is it?
Real superintelligences will do the fuck they want, and nobody can stop them. But I doubt we'll get there this time, and there won't be a next.
Well, I’ve learned to think of these things as wealth transfers — is that fair in this context.? Question is, where’s all the money going that big tech is loosing? To power companies, or is more complex than that?
it's going to Nvidia, Samsung, Micron, western Digital. companies that make hardware components. those are the pickaxes in this story.
Also maybe construction companies etc who build the data centres... They don't care if the centre is ultimately profitable... They're getting paid now.
Construction companies run pretty tight margins because it's an industry with a lot of competition. I'm sure they're not hurting, but the niche component suppliers are robbing the economy blind.
Remember, the execs are bonusing themselves. They are all getting filthy rich right now.
(And like all scams, they don't care about efficiency.)
It's going in a circle, eventually ending up at nvidia and co.
also effectively wasting planets resources
I thought Big Tech loved burning money.
When there's no more money to burn they'll start burning people.
Man, I miss MoviePass... For $9.99/mo, it converted venture capital into something people could directly enjoy by watching as many movies as possible!
Turns out it's hard to make money if you don't sell infinite free copies of a product that you only have to produce once.
Lol big tech loves speculating. It's a bubble, and if not now, when? ... Delivering real products is such a pain in the ass.
It’s fucking bandwagoning. That’s it. That’s all this is. I hope the market destroys them for it.
Wall Street spent years demanding AI investment, then panicked when AI investment showed up on the balance sheet: If Alphabet keeps printing record profits while building the infrastructure for the next decade, this may end up looking more like impatience than prudence. The market loves growth, until it has to pay for it.
That's because the amount of AI investment looks like orders of magnitude more than anyone is willing to pay for AI products.
They were happy about spending billions, but now the bubble is into the trillions and there isn't tens of trillions in market demand to make an investment that big pay off.
That assumes demand is fixed. Historically, the biggest technology shifts created entirely new markets that barely existed beforehand. Almost nobody predicted today’s cloud or app economy from early internet revenue. AI spending could still prove excessive, but current demand is a poor ceiling for what future demand might become.
Current buyers are looking to cut back on spending, rather than dramatically increase. And that's based on current prices which are being subsidised by burning investor money, not the prices they need to charge to make a profit.
Cloud and apps didn't need trillions in investment to still not get off the ground. There isn't really any scenario in which current AI spending doesn't turn out to be excessive.
Maybe, but »excessive investment« and »failed technology« aren’t the same thing: Railroads, fiber optics and the dot com era all burned absurd amounts of capital, yet the infrastructure outlived the investors. AI could follow the same pattern: terrible returns for today’s shareholders, enormous value for tomorrow’s economy.
Yeah, but the AI infrastructure is made out of compute hardware that's going to need replaced in 6 years. Not rails that will still be useable in 50 years.
We aren't building lasting infrastructure other than the actual buildings.
I’d argue the models and software are the real long term assets. GPUs depreciate like any other hardware, but a better training pipeline, inference stack, proprietary data, and a model with millions of paying users can survive multiple hardware generations. The chips are replaceable. The ecosystem and customer relationships are much harder to replicate.
Yeah, there’s a lot of innovation going on to run powerful models on modest hardware and the state of the art for running local models is changing all the time. If the trend continues, models hosted in a data center will only be for niche use cases.
That would certainly be the good ending, I won’t hold my breath for it
"If you build it, they will come" refers to a homemade baseball field in a work of fiction. It's not a valid argument for spending trillions of dollars to support demand that doesn't exist just on the off chance that some day it might.
False
It will be interesting how this plays out. The only bright spot of the bullshit Trump economy is Wall Street's success and AI investing is what is driving that.
Don't forget Trump has made oil way more expensive. That's a huge favor to the world and the things that live on it!
He's also decimated environmental regulation...so, definitely not a huge favour.
Only in the USA. Which is only part of North America. The world is a big place.
Unfortunately, Trump's walls don't contain pollution, and industries use that local lack of regulation to lobby other governments, as in, "look, we can do that in the US, why can't we do it here?"
We all live on earth and climate change is global
view more: next ›