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AI needs $6tn in annual revenue to justify data centre boom, Bain says | The National
(www.thenationalnews.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2026
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Ok so this is interesting. I am not sure this number is accurate I haven't fully vetted it. I do this same type of forecasting. Morgan Stanley said for current capex commitments by 2027 4th quarter they needed to be 700 billion in profit. The problem is to meet that number they would need full market saturation and another 3 trillion in capex for build out. That means the entire accessible market would be using AI. They have another problem that more than half the world cannot access AI in its current form. The tooling these companies are using are wasteful and don't meet the bandwidth needs of mobile first countries. So until the industry adopts things like https://codecai.net/ half the world's markets are inaccessible. Finally they are under attack from all sides even if they had the money they may not have the ability to build out the AI infrastructure because that build out is becoming untenable for most communities. Even more the open source models and low cost AI are already in someways encroaching quickly on frontier systems. If you look at it right now the only reason you don't have home AI as a commonplace solution is because the manufacturer has chosen not to sell it to you.
The local models thing is the real threat. For what 90% of the world who actually cares and wants AI, a local model is probably already "good enough". Or would be if they could get the hardware, or maybe they don't know how to set one up.
Got a 27b model running on my gaming GPU. Its a bit slow but good enough to look someing up, causual coding, and stupid questions. China is really kicking ass with the open source models.
Light web searching suggests that neither the automobile industry as a whole nor the health insurance industry as a whole exceed $3 trillion in annual global revenue. Which means the plagiarism-to-slop pipeline just needs to make a little bit more than the automobile and health insurance industries combined to justify itself.
Easy. AI cloud controlled vehicle fleet with government support to make it mandatory, AI health centers as default healthcare, supplement the rest with premium AI generated nudies.
Wow you just described something that would make me go full IRA good job. Fucken caused a physical recoil in absolute horror.
And memory shortage. By buying up all RAM they ensured that you can't run much more than lobotomized models.
Still much cheaper to run an open source model on a rented gpu from the cloud.
Also note Apple's, AMD's and NVIDIA's (Spark) unified memory solutions for local LLMs/agents. AMD advertises 300B and NVIDIA advertises 200B models running locally. The question is whether Anthropic/OpenAI are going to be relevant at all in the future, with local models becoming increasingly capable and affordable. However: There are rumors the Chinese government wants to restrict access to its models. Not set in stone and also not sure whether this is true. Could this entail no more access to new open-source models? Who knows. But even then, energy and resources are going to be a bottleneck. I have not looked into the concrete numbers and this is not my field of expertise, but I find it highly unlikely that they are going to be able to capture the entire market.
I'm just waiting for some breakthrough in the hardware and suddenly all of those data centers become outdated.
With the stories of AI being used to break into secure systems I wouldn't be surprised if other nations also start throwing up walls to block them.
Same, but for the software. Backpropagation based software is a known limitation to current GenAI LLMs.
This isn't the same thing as making VCRs cheap enough that every home has one. There is no FOMO wirh AI at the consumer level, no one knows what to do with it. The only people who want it are the ones who male it!!