Posted by Now that the midterms are over, the stock market celebrated on Wednesday. Then the reality of what might happen to the AI build-out caused a huge sell off on Thursday. My retirement account gained over $9,000 in one day. Then gave it all back the next day. Luckly, my exposure to semiconductor and AI stocks is minimal. On Friday, my account gained a bit, but not near enough to recover from Thursday’s losses. I didn’t buy or sell anything during the turmoil. Now, I’m worried that the few AI related ETF’s that are in my brokerage account will never recover, because after the election, investors realized that we just elected a bunch of politicians who want to put the brakes on data center construction.
There are efforts underway to address the three main problems with data centers. Noise, power consumption, and water usage are the areas targeted. I watched a YouTube video about data center issues the other day. They showed a company that was developing a low heat compute module. Lower heat means less cooling resulting in lower power consumption. It made me feel a little better when I heard that someone was actively working on a solution. There was a post from Elon after the election. It said, “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.” I hear it’s pretty cold in space, so cooling wouldn’t be an issue. I’m just not sure how they plan on getting all that data from space back to Earth. The fastest data transfer rate from space to Earth (downlink) is 200 gigabits per second (Gbps), achieved by NASA using infrared laser.
Researchers using plasmonic modulators achieved 424 Gbps over a 53-kilometer turbulent link, pointing to future speeds potentially reaching 1.4 terabits per second. I’m sure they will solve this problem and be able to build a data center on the Moon in a few years. Then we won’t have to worry about noisy data centers being built in our neighborhoods. But we will still have AI creeping into all aspects of our lives to complain about.