Seems like it might leave behind underutilized data centers full of subsidized compute seeking paying tenants.

> previous busts left useful infrastructure behind (rail, fibre) that could still be used. If/When the AI/LLM companies go bust, what will be left over afterwards and how useful will it be?

Many many idle GPUs.

Hey, you can do a lot of fun and useful things with idle GPUs if the prices come down! Think of all the RAM as well.

Who will house and cool them?

I’m pretty sure that when the railroads went bust that nobody pulled up the rails and put them somewhere else. And when the internet bust happened, they didn’t pull up all the dark fiber and lay it down somewhere else.

I would bet that if all those GPUs go idle, they stay housed and cooled in the data center they were originally installed in, for better or for worse.

> Many many idle GPUs.

Yes, but what use will they have? Rail lines and dark fibre could be used post-bust (and don't depreciate all that quickly).

LLM technology will not go away. The premise here is that the foundation model companies will bust. So now there will be tons of idle GPU, where companies like AWS and Azure, or even Coreweave and Lambda, can pick them up for cheap and rent them out to people who want to run open source/open weight models.

LLMs as of whatever open models are SOTA when the proprietary bubble bursts, plus... whatever else you can do on GPUs - weather modeling, CFD, genetics research, and so on, and so on.

And that's at day 0. Because LLMs are not going away, thank to open weight models, and the race for capabilities has left so, so many low-hanging fruits unpicked, we'd have a decade or more of useful R&D to do even if LLM capabilities suddenly plateaued tomorrow and never improved.

I mean, look at Jev making round in the industry now - this is just a single example of a low-hanging fruit that took many years for someone to bother to pick up and market a bit. There's many, many more of these just laying around.

> what will be left over afterwards and how useful will it be?

Don't focus on the hardware. The models themselves are tremendously valuable. These tools would've been considered alien technology just 15 years ago.