> If the AI companies all go bust we're going to have a lot of spare data center capacity!

I can be wrong I usually am but an AI DC != compute DC or that it might decrease the prices of servers substantially because of it. (well not exactly, I hope you read my whole message so that I am able to better explain what I am saying.). AI DC's try to optimize for one thing: running GPU's for immense scalability and flexibility (0 to numbers>=large_number).

Currently, its actually way worse, the server providers are some of the worst impacted by the industry at the moment because each server requires ram and ram is well... increasing in its price exponentially. It's really a tough time to be a provider at this time (in certain respects) directly because of AI.

It is unclear to me if spare DC capacity will have any meaningful impact to it. I don't think that atleast within compute (and not GPU/AI DC), that space was too large of a problem.

Fun fact but one of the largest providers (BuyVM) had its datacenter price from where they colo'd increase because of the immense demand at the moment for spots in datacenters by many tens of thousands of dollars that they did the first price hike in at this point at decades! The situation is this dire :-(

Ram prices might come falling down and DC's might get cheaper but they can only get cheaper to limit, they still need to for example DC security employees

and I wish to suggest that if anything, investors might wish to re-coup their losses within the AI loss, they might want to make up with what little they might have (ahem DC)

For example, if you wish to want to take at an even more egregious example of what I am suggesting, there are many new york LLC's who would much rather leave the properties that they own empty rather than decreasing the price of what it costs (which they have set to some egregious amounts). I think that for them, somehow the math ends up working out in the end somehow, so there might be something more to it.

I wish I was optimist but I don't believe that the gains in spare data center capacity are worth even a fraction of fraction of the damage if AI were to go bust as you suggested with trillions of dollars vanished.

So, with the data I have at the moment, I am unable to suggest that compute would be cheaper. Heck, it was cheaper before AI and compute prices have never been something that people worry about because there are sometimes 10x cheaper options than AWS,GCP,Azure with things like Hetzner/OVH and others (yes its not a 1:1 situation but still its a 95% overlap and for all intents and purposes, great)

I can see a potential where GPU compute can get cheaper, oh boy, its so much more expensive than compute but I feel like GPU's aside from AI might still have a much more limited niche than generic CPU.

The issue wasn't ever the pricing. Simon, I own 7$/yr vps's which run my websites fine because they are written in golang. I doubt it can get cheaper than it. (You can get a 3$/yr vps if that is what you are interested with using Nat VPS + cf tunnels)

I would once again appreciate to hear your thoughts on it. The only thing I realistically see is if Ram producers ramp up their productions and create a ram price glut in the next few years, but imo the prices would even out over the long term.

I have seen the point of spare DC capacity being raised up multiple times but I finally ended up writing a message which hopefully captures the nuance, but once again, I don't know the future about it.

Waiting for your reply and have a nice day Simon (& other readers) and thanks for reading if you did, I appreciate it :-D