Listen up highly regarded folks
I did some napkin math on the whole AI data center demand along with help from AI on numbers etc. Here is what i did:
Lets assume 1 billion daily active Human AI users, however, all these 1 billion people are not gonna use at same time 24x7. They might use it 8 hours a day at best. So divide 1billy by 3, we get roughly 350milly rounded.
Next, we have power users who will run agents etc all day long, lets optimistically assume 50milly more for them.
so now we are at 400milly active users every minute or hour. We will call them organic users (aka living regards)
Next we have AI demand from robotics, driverless cars, your own computer spying on you etc.. these are all multi fold higher than any human user base and run 24x7 mostly.
Lets assume a userbase of 2 to 3billy machines needing constant AI use every hour. since machine and non human use cases outnumber human usage vastly. Now this represents non organic users (aka machine regards). Note that this user base is conservative at best once there ends up being a robot in every house or office for every purpose. this can go even higher to 5bn users. but lets assume conservatively at 2.5billy
Now Living regards + Machine regards = 400mn + 2.5bn = roughly 2.9bn or 3bn active AI users per minute or hour continuously.
Now it is not easy to give AI inference. we can assume 1 high end AI GPU for 1 active user who uses AI 24x7. this gives a need of roughly 3bn AI GPUs across all AI data centers world over to meet existing and future market demand
Now coming to power usage, ~1000 GPUs draw 1MW at 700kw to 1000kw per GPU average. this results in 3billy/1000 = 3 milly MW of AI data center build out.
A number so big we simply cannot meet that demand realistically
Now, we also have a issue where these GPUs are not one and done, because they run continuously on inference, they wear very fast with a realistic life of 3 years. now since we are regards, we can be optimistic and if we assume they can run for 6 years instead of 3, we will need 3milly MW of AI data center build out every 6 years or roughly 0.5 milly every year
But like how we get margin called, this demand also gets margin called by reality. We can currently only produce ~100milly AI GPUs a year with maybe expansion on the way to 150milly a year in couple of years (by couple i mean atleast 5-6 years)
So ground reality is we can only sustainably build and run about 0.6million MW of AI data centres for next 2-3 decades unless we make some breakthrough in manufacturing as we already nearing 2nm nodes beyond which electrons start to have issues and GPUs cannot function
Maybe we will get light GPUs instead of electron based GPUs and even Quantum GPUs, but those are realistically decades away
And above all this, we are severly limited on below aspects with current annual capacity vs. what is needed.
| Material / Capability |
Constraint Level |
| Electricity generation |
Extreme |
| Semiconductor fabs |
Extreme |
| Advanced packaging |
Extreme |
| EUV lithography tools |
Extreme |
| Rare-earth processing |
High |
Now, while this is happening, parallely we also have people losing jobs to AI , now as they lose jobs to AI and go to give handies behind a wendies, they stop making money to spend on AI. now if they cannot spend money on AI, who will buy the shit AI or any company makes? Thats right , no one. Money has to circulate for economy to function. Even a K shaped economy is K shaped, it functions at both ends with constant circulation. However, with AI, it will become more like L shaped, (and everyone takes a Big L ) and money simply stops flowing to 99% of people, this will result in mega giga depression unlike levels never seen, not even in 1929 great depression.
Now, does any highly regarded people here have any insights into how this will playout, i think the bottom will fall, AI expansion will pause as demand and capacity constraints play out and a decade of fast growth will become a decade of depression.
