Apparently this is the full text...
This chart offers a reminder of how dependent the U.S. economy's growth is on the data-center buildout. Rising borrowing costs threaten those investments.
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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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so what's the best-use case for a repurposed/retrofitted data center post-bubble burst.
are they all typically masonry block on concrete slabs with ateel trusses (a warehouse) with clinate control, air filtering, above average water/electrcity consumption infrastructure (sewage/water discharge?).
just trying to imagine what other ways the structure could be reconfigured for community needs. emergency shelter, digital archive/library, community intranet..?
Paintball arenas.
lmao this feels like a setup by pointing out how these could be habitable, but I'll spoiler the pragmatic, most likely based on timing, but not best-for-community use-case because it's not in the spirit of your question.
spoiler
D~~ata~~etention Centers
Large concrete buildings with no visibility in or out, a short drive for ICE from anywhere. Plenty of space for the immigrants, dissidents, and other undesirables. And since The Government didn't have to build them* and can buy or lease them cheap when AI bursts, this will be a beautiful deal for the Taxpayers, maybe the most beautiful and artistic deal of all time.
*not counting the subsidies, tax breaks, and bailouts
Sorry. I hope I'm wrong.
Basically the same thing they're doing with all the postindustrial factories. The real question is what they'll do with all of those GPUs. I can't decide if they'll turn to bit coin mining or just grapes of wrath them.
they're not really gpus anymore, they're made specifically to do this shit and nothing else
What baffles my mind is how the entire LLM/Transformer architecture only began in 2017 (with the "Attention Is All You Need" paper), and less than 10 years later, the entire global economy decides to dedicate all of its efforts to creating tokens for these models. The money dedicated to this is bigger than the railroad, highway, and electrification buildouts COMBINED, in both dollars and percentage of GDP. Humanity is sacrificing its energy, capital, and natural resources to feed the AI machine. In a way, it has already enslaved us. And it hasn't even been 10 years!
AI ain't the one doing the enslaving, though, it all comes down to the fact that the only way anyone's ever made money in tech is by commandeering attention. This has been a really efficient method for concentrating wealth and now the only thing anyone who controls that wealth can think to do with it is finding increasingly elaborate ways to colonize the human mind.
All the latest cards from nVidia are still GPUs. There are TPUs which exclusively do tensor calculations but most data centers are running GPUs.
Well if you ask certain FT journalists and AI hypers saying that even if it is a bubble it will be fine, they will continue to be data centers and we will have even more and cheaper web services and data storage. But that ignores that there isn't enough demand for other uses, which is why they weren't being built at this level before. And those servers wouldn't need as much GPU power. In all likelyhood the ones that don't just get abandoned will be used for warehouses or niche factory production that needs the air handling, temperature control and large water inputs.
If you mean best uses if we stopped living under capitalism, then probably archives (both digital and physical, got that climate control and air filtration) and warehousing, and some niche manufacturing uses. Maybe indoor sports if you can rip out all the server racks and internals easily and have a large indoor space. They are near some populations, but usually are going to be at the outskirts of any town or city, if not rural areas, for the available cheap-er land, while being able to hook up to internet, power and water, and have less resistance to building from communities around. So community centers and internet nodes are probably less useful. Maybe emergency shelter, but it is mostly above ground construction so most natural disasters would be a crap shoot at best that it would be habitable but the surrounding area not. Maybe some form of quick temporary housing, but just like the major challenges of repurposing office buildings for housing, anything long term there is so much you have to change in a building not designed for housing to make it good housing that you are only coming out mildly ahead of tearing it down and starting over, best case scenario.
I really think this will be a bunch of abandoned architecture once the bubble pops.
Guess what, mass digital surveillance is gonna get really cheap really quickly.
After the impending AI collapse - you got me curious about the democrats. By state and federally in DC - what will they do with the centers? I have no idea other than to say - they will make the worst possible choices.
VOTE!
Likely the data centres will be used as infra for added surveillance
You suppose they're cinder blocks instead of plywood and vinyl siding?
I believe that they will be similar to other industrial building in that it will be concrete and steel frame/structure mostly. That is what you do, because you don't care about the internal finishing to make it look nice and you want to have sturdy anchor points everywhere for HVAC, conduits, and plumbing along with any more specialized installations. Think modern factories rather than modern mcmansions.
I was wondering this because I worked in some warehouses that were 50'x150' or larger and were tin-roofed plaster shacks. Data centers are an order of magnitude larger though.