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   May likes Toronto (mayintoronto@beige.party)'s status on Monday, 16-Feb-2026 23:40:40 JST May likes Toronto

   I wonder how much of the current AI bubble is really a front to build power infrastructure and data centres, so that we no longer have operational devices anymore and must resort to using their cloud services.

   Classic rent seeking behaviours.

   • Rich Felker repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 16-Feb-2026 23:40:37 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Douglas Floyd

     @mayintoronto @dfloyd888 A bottom tier Android phone repurposed is an order of magnitude more computing power than what any reasonably sized company actually *needs* for its servers. Only horribly inefficient software is preventing us from having a future where the cheap client devices they want us to use to rent their cloud shit just replace the cloud shit.

   • Embed this notice
     Douglas Floyd (dfloyd888@fosstodon.org)'s status on Monday, 16-Feb-2026 23:40:39 JST Douglas Floyd

     in reply to

     @mayintoronto I feel it will backfire if there is that assumption. There is an entire movement for sovereign clouds and sovereign LLMs, coupled with people losing interest in cloud services.

     The days of storing data on foreign government's soil, or a foreign government's company are becoming stuff in the rear view mirror.

   • Embed this notice
     May likes Toronto (mayintoronto@beige.party)'s status on Monday, 16-Feb-2026 23:40:39 JST May likes Toronto

     in reply to

     • Douglas Floyd

     @dfloyd888 not if there's no RAM or graphics cards available to build your publicly owned data centres.

     Or hard drives. https://mashable.com/article/ai-hard-drive-hdd-shortages-western-digital-sold-out

   • Embed this notice
     May likes Toronto (mayintoronto@beige.party)'s status on Monday, 16-Feb-2026 23:56:55 JST May likes Toronto

     in reply to

     Related thread: https://beige.party/@ZenHeathen/116077245972589149

     But you need to keep in mind that this isn't just about consumer hardware. Everyone's going to get hit by this, from individuals to institutions to the biggest corporations. If you can't buy hardware, your operational risk requires you to rent it.

     I'm surprised governments and megacorps aren't freaking out.

   • Embed this notice
     Chris Siebenmann (cks@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Feb-2026 06:35:49 JST Chris Siebenmann

     in reply to

     @mayintoronto For AI data centers built directly by AI companies, there's also the question if they even have suitable hardware and software infrastructure that would let them rent out general purpose capacity in AWS/Google Cloud like ways. The software, hardware, and operational stack for that is complex and hard to build and operate (just look at AWS outage reports for some of the hidden surprises, and AWS has been doing this for a long time).

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Feb-2026 06:35:49 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Chris Siebenmann

     @cks @mayintoronto It's very possible that the executive class *thinks* this will be infrastructure they can repurpose when the bubble pops because they have utterly zero understanding of it except what their yes-men tell them, and simultaneously that it's all actually useless.

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     Chris Siebenmann (cks@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Feb-2026 06:35:50 JST Chris Siebenmann

     in reply to

     @mayintoronto On the one hand this feels alarmingly possible. On the other hand, I'm reading stories about how planned data centers can't get turned on because there's no power (and when they put in power it's the most expensive, terrible power there is because that's what's available right now), and NVidia isn't even promising generation to generation compatibility for their DC racks, which almost certainly can't be reused for anything else. This doesn't feel like viable general infrastructure.