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The AI boom is sort of nuts. Actually, it’s totally nuts. As I’ve been saying lately, it really seems like a giant bubble that is going to pop at some point. But there are so many elements to the craziness, and we keep learning of more.
Steve Hanley recently wrote about a data center planned for northern Utah that would require twice as much power as the state of Utah as a whole currently uses. “Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University, believes the giant computer center will create a massive heat island capable of devastating the area’s ecology. He estimated the finished project would cover about as many square miles as Washington, D.C., making it the largest data center on the planet, and that it could produce enough heat to spike nighttime temperatures by as much as 28 degrees Fahrenheit [emphasis added] in the high desert valley where it will be located,” Steve writes. Even with all that I’ve read, that was a shocker.
In the face of enormous demand for computer hardware for all of these data centers, we got news a couple of days ago that Apple is rising prices on a bunch of its products. “In a statement shared with MacRumors, Apple said it raised prices because of the ongoing memory chip shortage, resulting from companies building out data centers with powerful AI servers. The supply-demand imbalance has led to skyrocketing prices for RAM and SSD storage chips used in a wide range of Apple products.”
