Ask Paul: November 14 ⭐

Happy Friday! It’s our last weekend in Mexico for the year, so let’s get it kicked off a bit early with some great reader questions.
? A post apocalyptic wasteland
train_wreck asks:

The forum post about the massive datacenter/power construction in the name of more and more AI made me think about whether all of this buildout will be, at least in the near term, a waste. DeepSeek already showed that models can be trimmed to be more efficient, as is naturally the case in the progression of tech. Is this rush to stand up infrastructure just another part of the AI bubble, and in 5 or 10 years will we end up with a lot of grossly underused computer warehouses? Will it be perhaps like the "dark fiber" initiatives of the 2000's bubble, where eventually, years later, there will be a newfound use for these sites?

Over the summer, we were discussing AI datacenters on Windows Weekly. Because I live in Pennsylvania, which is a shipping nexus for the northeast U.S. dating back to the days of dirt roads and canals, I’ve seen the impact of (mostly Amazon) warehouses springing up everywhere in our area. Farming has been declining in PA for many years, but for the most part, these spaces were transitioned into homes in the past. Now they’re all becoming warehouses, with giant trucks suddenly clogging what used to be bucolic country lanes, increased traffic everywhere, and declining road quality.

These warehouses probably seemed like easy money to the townships that OKed their construction. There were these big farms taking up a lot of space and paying whatever taxes. And now there are these big warehouses taking up that space but also ruining our roads and quality of life, and the tax payoff or whatever it is these communities thought they would get never materialized. Trucks drive in, trucks drive out. Trucks, trucks, trucks, everywhere.

So what could be worse than an Amazon warehouse? How about an Amazon datacenter?

After that episode, someone from a different part of PA emailed me to say he had heard our discussion, which included another bit described below, and he had decided to fight an effort to bring a datacenter into his community. There were all the usual meetings, with whatever this company was making its case. And he and his son both showed up at each in turn, trying to prevent the datacenter from coming there. In the end, to my surprise, they won: Through pushback from citizens, the township decided that a datacenter wasn’t right for the community. Which is the correct way to view this. Datacenters and communities don’t mix.

The discussion we had had on Windows Weekly was basically that these massive facilities were being built all over the world to meet the supposed needs of AI. And that these needs would be temporary, and thanks to technological improvements, as demonstrated nicely by DeepSeek, this capacity would not be needed in the future. And so these datacenters will go up quickly, drain all the electricity out of the...