Thread

AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom

222 points · 335 comments · Betelbuddy

bunderbunder · 1790711630 · focus · HN ↗
They talk a bit about where the AI companies are supposed to get their revenue from. I’d like to see these analyses go a step further and talk about how those AI customers are supposed to come up with that money as well.
For example, the article suggests $1T from enterprise productivity tooling. A quick Google suggests the global enterprise productivity tooling market is only worth about $0.1T right now.
Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?
1. nicce · 1790712741 · focus · HN ↗
  > Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?
  If they keep replacing employees with AI, that is indeed the direction.
  1. sailfast · 1790712841 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s true - but then where do folks get money to buy from the businesses?
    Eventually this merry-go-round runs into some issues if we don’t figure out a way to make this huge productivity boom work.
    ben_w · 1790713832 · focus · HN ↗
    All money is a merry-go-round when you get down to it.
    That doesn't mean the wheels won't fall off, they fall off pretty regularly as is.
    The difference between this loop and the previous loops, is that people making the tech used to be pretty straightforward ("invest in me, your money will let me make a machine that lets me fire 90% of my peasants and we can share in the savings"), while today they're all "invest in me, either this will kill everyone or just make the concept of money irrelevant, either way rotflmao".
    BenoitEssiambre · 1790714445 · focus · HN ↗
    In theory:
    1) This would make stocks worth a lot more and produce more dividends so everyone owning stock would get money to spend.
    2) Governments effectively indirectly own ~40% of all business profits via corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, sales taxes. So governments would also have more revenues to spend/redistribute (this depends on governments not wasting it, spending it on wars etc.)
    xboxnolifes · 1790715475 · focus · HN ↗
    #1 is still mostly just moving money from the poor to the rich. Most people working for a wage are going to be in the bottom 80%, yet the top 20% own over 80% of the stocks.
    someonebaggy · 1790715617 · focus · HN ↗
    From other business owners. If this hypothesis is true, they're saying the share of wealth controlled by labour goes dramatically down, and the share of wealth controlled by capital goes dramatically up. So most of your revenue will come from capital holders instead of labourers.
    0c3ca83 · 1790716621 · focus · HN ↗
    Folks stop having money to buy from businesses. Other businesses buy from them instead.
    There's no hard and fast rule that humans need to be involved in the economy, it's just that until recently, you needed to pay them in order to have an economy that worked.
    Corporations are legally people; give them enough brains, and they may become a real boy one day.
    riffraff · 1790717814 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah yes, the "Accelerando"[0] dead galaxy where all life's dead and only automated corporations remain.
    0: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando
    0c3ca83 · 1790739239 · focus · HN ↗
    This is the world we're building.
    cthalupa · 1790759140 · focus · HN ↗
    If it frees humans up to pursue whatever we desire instead of having to work to generate more value for someone else than myself, then I'm happy.
    Now obviously, hell is more likely than a utopia, but this is the sort of advancement that would be required for us to reach that point. Something has to do the work.

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