I think one problem with that comparison is that due to how energy intensive these datacentres are, they are very fast depreciating assets, unlike e.g. the telecom infrastructure that was (over-)built during the dot-com bubble, or the railway tracks from the era of Railway Mania.
The only reason a GPU-based compute-heavy datacentre built 5 years ago is still in operation today is the component shortage.
Without the current component shortages, those datacentres would just be so much less energy efficient per flop that it would literally be cheaper to just scrap the thing and rebuild it.
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This is not to say that we shouldn't build datacentres, but just that I wouldn't be so sure that the datacentres being built today won't be stranded assets long before they pay themselves off.
I agree, the datacenters and the GPUs inside them might be the least valuable thing to come out of the boom. The research in chips, architectures, and training, and the supporting infrastructure in fabs and energy grids still seems highly valuable. Europe will still see very little of that, but at least the Chinese labs still publish some of their research.
Comments
I think one problem with that comparison is that due to how energy intensive these datacentres are, they are very fast depreciating assets, unlike e.g. the telecom infrastructure that was (over-)built during the dot-com bubble, or the railway tracks from the era of Railway Mania.
The only reason a GPU-based compute-heavy datacentre built 5 years ago is still in operation today is the component shortage.
Without the current component shortages, those datacentres would just be so much less energy efficient per flop that it would literally be cheaper to just scrap the thing and rebuild it.
_________
This is not to say that we shouldn't build datacentres, but just that I wouldn't be so sure that the datacentres being built today won't be stranded assets long before they pay themselves off.
I agree, the datacenters and the GPUs inside them might be the least valuable thing to come out of the boom. The research in chips, architectures, and training, and the supporting infrastructure in fabs and energy grids still seems highly valuable. Europe will still see very little of that, but at least the Chinese labs still publish some of their research.