this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026

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Half of planned US data center builds have been delayed or canceled, growth limited by shortages of power infrastructure and parts from China — the AI build-out flips the breakers (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 6 hours ago by commander@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] null@lemmy.org 7 points 1 hour ago

U.S. still depends on China, despite years of onshoring efforts.

Reminds me of that time when one president signed a bill to move chip production to the US then the next president raided the chip-making facility and arrested all those chip-making people for trying to show the locals how to make chips.

[–] MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Makes you wonder what they're going to do with all this hardware they're buying? I hope that they (the ultra rich) are the ones to hold the bag for once in their lives.

Just kidding, they'll probably get a bailout from our (US) corrupt government.

[–] Prove_your_argument@piefed.social 53 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Makes sense. It takes years to complete construction projects and budgets always overrun. AI is a fad for most companies trying to get into it.

Think about the dotcom bubble. We went from having all of these businesses that shot to the moon for valuation... and then it collapsed. Feels exactly the same. A few will survive to become metas and googles because it is not a worthless technology, but most of them are going to be worthless companies when investors decide it's time to run.

[+] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip -11 points 5 hours ago (5 children)

Think about the dotcom bubble. We went from having all of these businesses that shot to the moon for valuation… and then it collapsed.

Amazon and Google and basically all of FAANG/MAMA beg to differ.

And basically every company still has a website and ecommerce in general is still massive.

The Dot Com bubble was brutal. But it was not a collapse of the industry. It was much more of a correction after so many companies blew up to sell services like "rate my dog" and many of the smaller ecommerce sites were absorbed by larger ones.

And that is likely what will happen with generative AI. I expect a MUCH bigger bloodbath for openai but anthropic seem to have scaled a lot better (although they also are going into their IPO with a massive data breach...). But expect most of the smaller companies to similarly get gutted.

But

Makes sense. It takes years to complete construction projects and budgets always overrun. AI is a fad for most companies trying to get into it.

Data Centers exploding... honestly have little to do with AI. No... not the way they explode in the UAE... metaphorical exploding. The reality is that data centers are GOOD money. Basically every company needs data hosting and offloading internal infrastructure is... honestly a really smart play. Same with the massive push for streaming of basically everything so that nobody owns anything and subscribe to everything. You want regional data centers and... this is how you get them.

[–] CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 6 minutes ago

Their comment literally mentions Google and Facebook as the survivors, so I'm not sure what good it does to include them in your argument.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 1 points 15 minutes ago

On the FAANG/MAAMA, he said explicitly some winners but a whole lot of losers, so you are agreeing with him. Of those titans, only Amazon and Google were arguably dot com darlings. Apple was pretty much left out of it and in bad shape, Microsoft did "ok" but was not really a darling of that bubble. Facebook, Netflix didn't exist.

The data center explosion has everything to do with the AI boom. That's the only change around the recent inflection point of growth. They were certainly prolific, but this is beyond. They are now demanding incredibly more power and cooling density than before. OpenAI by itself made purchasing commitments to the tune of 40 prevent of the entire supply of ram production across all industries. Probably 75 to 80 percent of the recent plans would not have happened if not for the LLM craze.

[–] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

FAANG exists because they have rock solid products with built in users. Their new business initiatives and decisions are woefully lacking. The new ideas aren't bubbling up. Nvidia is the only one that isn't staring into the abyss but their only products are iterative and once something revolutionary comes along they are sunk, like AMD v Intel these last 5 years.

Don't think FAANG is a leader of anything except valuation. They are hopeless business leaders.

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 9 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Amazon and Google and basically all of FAANG/MAMA beg to differ.

But it was not a collapse of the industry.

I mean they don’t beg to differ at all and it absolutely collapsed. The result of which is the reason why FAANG as an acronym exists. FAANG is the resulting consolidation of the industry made possible by its widespread collapse.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 9 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Data centers existing makes sense, but this specific aggressive AI data center buildout (with special-purpose hardware) doesn't: the two AI companies you mentioned, OpenAI and Anthropic, aren't making a profit, and they don't appear to have a viable path to one. OpenAI claims it'll be wildly profitable in just a few years, but they don't go into how.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip -5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

"aren't making a profit" gets into the mess that is book keeping and is a giant rabbit hole people actively avoid because it is just easier to get angry at stupidity rather than complex malfeasance.

But what makes something an "AI data center" outside of the branding?

The reality is that it is a shit ton of computers connected to a really fast internet connection. Preferably through a properly managed set of switches but you do you. And the reason that we still mostly use GPUs for "AI" rather than highly specialized hardware (although, nvidia DID just buy groq a few months back...) is for that reason. They might do linear algebra of quarter precision floats REALLY well but they also do linear algebra of single and double precision floats pretty well too. And the CPUs and mobos (that are mostly optimized for data movement to offload to said GPUs) are no slouches either.

Which is what most of these companies are planning for. openai is, arguably, really fucking stupid. Whereas anthropic have shown decent signs of "diversifying" as it were. And nvidia... if we lived in a world where they could get enough RAM I think they would be fine. As it stands... Jensen (and a LOT of people) are kinda fucked and I expect to see a hard pivot over the next 12 months.

Because if we banned ALL generative AI tomorrow? The people who think you can't use a computer without installing litellm first are gonna be fucked. But everyone else will just put other workloads on there and be... "fine" is a strong word but they won't go bankrupt. And the data centers themselves will still be incredibly valuable.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 7 points 3 hours ago

I wish GPUs in AI data centers (or worse, the ones purchased and not installed yet) were more general-purpose than they appear to be. That's the part that makes them AI data centers: the optimized hardware.

I do agree things are complex. And I like reading about the intricacies of that complexity. The overall picture is still a pretty bad one, though.

[–] Emi@ani.social 25 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Let the prices fall.

[–] kambusha@sh.itjust.works 15 points 4 hours ago

Let the prices hit the floor
Let the prices hit the floor
Let the prices hit the..

[–] Xaphanos@lemmy.world 8 points 5 hours ago

It's a planning thing. My company has sewed up power capacity contracts with the utility providers very early in the process. We have outstanding capacity contracts available for future build out commitments. It's the folks late to the party that are starting projects without a plan and then failing.

[+] wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io -9 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

This is disconcerting. China’s not going to slow down on their build out of infrastructure.

And for those who spin this as a positive. AI is not all LLMs. Real diseases are being cured by the complex modeling, real world tangible products, like airplanes and ships, are being designed safer.

I speculate that there’s a good chance that the modeling will eventually help to resolve the climate issue too, rather than continue to contribute to it. Physics models become more robust for simulating nuclear fusion; logistics models for transportation and energy distribution too.

Living in a tourist town, I don’t want a large data center in my backyard either, but there are plenty of places that do and where it makes sense to do so both from a logistical and resource perspective.

We get behind the curve here and it’s going to be near impossible to catch up, and when the smart people can’t play ball with the newest toys, that leads to brain drain.

[–] CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 minute ago

These data centers are NOT being used for research. Universities and research companies generally have their own computer clusters for that.

These are being designed and built for LLMs and LLMs only.

Plus, the US has already lost. We've cut off our allies, destroyed our trade partnerships, made the economy unsustainable, and also caused the very brain drain you mention here. We're cooked for decades at the least.

[–] ramble81@lemmy.zip 13 points 3 hours ago

Oh fuck off with your whitewashing. Majority of these AI installations are LLMs. Look at what Oracle, Grok, OpenAI, Microsoft and more have been trying to build off. It’s all an infrastructure race that is hurting us all (physically too if you look at how they’re being powered).

The sooner it collapses, the better.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 2 points 5 hours ago

Nobody wants a data center in their backyard.