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I just wrote two articles on AI, and as YouTube has determined this is now what I’m interested in, I keep getting fed interesting videos on the topics I included in my two op-eds, so I keep watching/listening to more on this.
Thinking about the topic more, though, and thinking about how it relates to what we normally focus on here at CleanTechnica, another story came to mind. I thought about this a week or so ago too, but then neglected to return to it. As I’m writing about AI, I am constantly thinking about the massive data centers and their power needs, and how much of a problem for our climate catastrophe they are. Frankly, that’s mostly got me interested in AI at all over the past couple of years — otherwise, I haven’t been stimulated that much by it. We’ve written about that a lot, though, so it doesn’t seem like a new topic worth writing about again.
However … as we are approaching a real potential popping of the “AI bubble” (if we can call it that), the finance community and investors slamming the brakes on the enormous trains full of money that have been going into AI, and the industry perhaps having its infrastructure growth story crash on itself, I’m wondering: how does that proceed and what are the ramifications more broadly.
Before I venture down a thought experiment on that, though, I am curious what you readers think about that. I know some of you have thought much more about this than me for much longer than it’s piqued my interest. What happens in the power industry if we go from AI hypergrowth to a serious financial crash or bubble bursting?
To set the stage more for this, here’s one more video on the potential industry crisis that’s building:
And, well, this one once more in case you missed it:
And here’s one more that I’ve just started listening to that I can already tell is going to be good:
Featured image by Edu Raw
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