this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
112 points (100.0% liked)

news

24488 readers
656 users here now

Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.

Rules:

-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --

Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.

All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body.

If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include not just the twitter.com URL but also Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source (archive.today, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org). Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed.

Mass-tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken Markov chain bot will result in a comm ban.

Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.

Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned.

Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
all 29 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] coolusername@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago

AI article.

[–] DivineChaos100@hexbear.net 34 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Working at a call center and we now use an ai for documenting calls "to reduce workloads" and now documenting calls takes about 50% longer because i have to correct the bullshit the ai makes up.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 21 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

awesome. you have a great excuse to be less productive.

[–] Damarcusart@hexbear.net 13 points 13 hours ago

Except that the boss gets mad at them for taking longer per call, and refuses to accept that the AI is the problem.

[–] miz@hexbear.net 43 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

the headline stat being an absolute amount instead of a percentage is sus. NVIDIA has lost 400bn in a day before

[–] LeninWeave@hexbear.net 25 points 16 hours ago

The current market cap of Oracle is approximately 545bn. It's approximately a 6% drop in 48 hours, nothing major unless it continues.

[–] witty_username@feddit.nl 36 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I'll start getting excited when they lose a further $100 and when nvidia also starts to considerably lose value

[–] FloridaBoi@hexbear.net 34 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I think nvidia is the key here. If they start faltering then it’s game over. We could start seeing other affiliated companies like coreweave start missing targets by wider and wider margins which would begin signaling collapse.

Obvs if emergency loans or grants are handed out by the government then a collapse is assured.

[–] Lovely_sombrero@hexbear.net 30 points 20 hours ago

Nvidia is the key, but they will also probably be the last to go. They are selling actual hardware for (mostly) actual $$$$

[–] PKMKII@hexbear.net 44 points 21 hours ago

Microsoft’s September 2024 announcement that it would restart the Three Mile Island nuclear facility—site of America’s worst nuclear accident—marked a turning point. The twenty-year power purchase agreement secured dedicated electricity supply for Microsoft’s data centers at a scale that the existing grid could not provide. The Department of Energy approved a one billion dollar loan guarantee in November 2025 to accelerate the restart, now targeting 2027 operation.

what-the-hell but not from a “we’re gonna have the three mile island incident part deux” view. People’s energy bills are through the roof, everything is pointing towards needing reduced energy usage, and what’s the government doing about it? Giving Microsoft a loan to get their own personal nuclear reactor so Copilot can write a stilted response email for the useless middle managers of the world.

[–] Wheaties@hexbear.net 54 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

The consequences extend beyond individual data centers. On November 28, 2025, the CME Group—operator of the world’s largest derivatives exchange—experienced a complete trading halt. Treasury futures, energy markets, agricultural contracts—90 percent of global derivatives volume went dark. The cause was not a cyberattack. It was not software failure. A cooling system failed at a data center in Aurora, Illinois. The machines that price risk for the global economy exceeded their thermal limits.

The CME had sold that data center in 2016 for 130 million dollars and leased it back. When the cooling failed, CME owned nothing. It controlled nothing. It waited, like everyone else, for someone else to fix the pipes.

This single incident illuminates a truth that financial markets have not yet fully absorbed: the limit on computational throughput is not processing power. It is heat rejection capacity. The engine of global price discovery was built on silicon that melts.

point-and-laugh-1point-and-laugh-2

[–] KuroXppi@hexbear.net 8 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

The engine of global price discovery was built on silicon that melts.

This is my 'cellar door'

[–] Wheaties@hexbear.net 3 points 11 hours ago (2 children)
[–] Blakey@hexbear.net 2 points 8 hours ago

J.R.R. Tolkien, iirc, said it was the most pleasant sounding phrase in the English language.

[–] KuroXppi@hexbear.net 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

It's a saying to mean a phrase or set of words that sounds pleasant due, mostly, to the combination of sounds.

(The meaning of the sentence being pleasant, too, is a bonus)

[–] Wheaties@hexbear.net 30 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

IMF Chief Economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas drew the critical distinction in October 2025: “This is not financed by debt, and that means if there is a market correction... it doesn’t necessarily transmit to the broader financial system.” The channel through which technology bubbles become systemic crises—excessive leverage amplifying losses—is largely absent from the hyperscaler balance sheets.

lea-tired Oh, yeah, these wealthy companies will totally keep the losses contained to their own cash-flows, they're definitely not gonna try and force the public to foot the bill.

[–] ConcreteHalloween@hexbear.net 31 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Sam Altman has already said he expects a government bailout.

[–] Wheaties@hexbear.net 25 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

The bull case has merit. Enterprise ROI is measurable. Hyperscaler balance sheets are strong. Investment as a share of GDP remains below historical peaks. Efficiency gains may outpace demand growth.

The bear case has merit. Circular financing amplifies correlation risk. Thermodynamic limits are non-negotiable. Depreciation accounting may be masking massive losses. Valuation metrics are historically extreme.

What cannot be done is to pretend that one case is obviously correct and the other obviously wrong. The uncertainty is genuine. The stakes are enormous. And the resolution will unfold not in earnings calls or analyst reports but in the quiet hum of cooling systems that either work or fail, in grids that either hold or collapse, in a physical world that operates by laws no financial innovation can repeal.

[...]

In the end, this story is not about artificial intelligence. It is about the collision between human ambition and physical reality. We have built machines that think by making machines that heat.

Machines that think. Really.

This otherwise good analysis seems to be predicated on critically digging into everything - the hardware, the financial instruments, the historical parallels. Everything except the software itself. Those claims are taken at face value.

[–] LeninWeave@hexbear.net 13 points 20 hours ago

The bull case has merit. Enterprise ROI is measurable. Hyperscaler balance sheets are strong. Investment as a share of GDP remains below historical peaks. Efficiency gains may outpace demand growth.

The bear case has merit. Circular financing amplifies correlation risk. Thermodynamic limits are non-negotiable. Depreciation accounting may be masking massive losses. Valuation metrics are historically extreme.

I like how the bull case is literally all made up vague nonsense, whereas the bear case is mostly hard facts and incontrovertible realities.

[–] Lovely_sombrero@hexbear.net 31 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Investors who hold Oracle's bonds from just a few months ago are already 10% underwater with them. Oracle also can't finish multiple datacenters because of a parts shortage. The shortage in memory chips started to appear just a few months ago, everyone who was in the last stages of building a datacenter would've received memory chips months ago. The speculation is that they don't have the customers for those datacenters, or more precisely, that OpenAI just doesn't have the money to lease them anymore.

I guess that Nvidia can always lease those datacenters instead and pay Oracle in GPUs, that would be normal and cool.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/oracle-reportedly-delays-several-new-openai-data-centers-because-of-shortages-tight-material-and-labor-supply-frustrate-expansion-plans-possibly-by-a-year-or-more

[–] jackmaoist@hexbear.net 20 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

OpenAI doesn't really need more datacenters now. Their user base is declining and it will go down as people switch to better models. Sam Altman can shove his DRAM wafers up his ass.

[–] jack@hexbear.net 16 points 20 hours ago

But they need investors to believe they need more datacenters or the house of cards tumbles

[–] mendiCAN@hexbear.net 16 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

how many GB does altmans BIOS recognize ?

[–] Lovely_sombrero@hexbear.net 13 points 21 hours ago

100TB, but it is all zeros.

[–] gay_king_prince_charles@hexbear.net 25 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Aw shit this won't be fun. It might be funny though.

[–] BeanisBrain@hexbear.net 19 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

It's like that one Chinese curse, "May you live in weeks where decades happen"

[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 5 points 13 hours ago

Or my favorite proverb, "There are boring times, and there are interesting times"

[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 25 points 22 hours ago