I really get the feeling that the economy is being artificially propped up at the moment and the key event I suspect they're being propped up for is the midterm elections. Post election, I feel like the cracks will start to show and we'll start to get a correction which will lead to a crash, similar in size to 2008.
That's just my feeling and it isn't necessarily backed on too much but significant amounts of resources have been poured into "AI" and I really don't feel the payoffs are going to pan out. Once that becomes the mainstream view, everything built around it crumbles.
Half wrong. It is currently "propped up" but that's because the US has a shit ton of debt to refinance in '26 (8 Trillion). The squeeze will follow that because then there's no need to flood the system to manipulate interest rates until next time.
AI is current tech darling but it's independant of the current circumstances. Once it plateaus they'll focus on quantum processing again to bypass limitations and throw money at orbital data centre infrastructure (orbital payload delivery, solar, battery, satellite to terrestrial network solutions). They'll probably be the main focus for the next 8-10 years. Data centres will be first use and the test case for further development, so the infrastructure around it is the better investment over the centres themselves, like AI, if we're looking very long term.
100% You can practically never go wrong assuming that we'll need more energy tomorrow than we do today.
Someone will probably eventually come along and tell them to stop using open loop cooling, there will be some money to be made there too even if they'll use in-house solutions in the end.
You say that, but right now everyone is jerking themselves raw over $60 oil. These data centers need a miniature sun to power, yet energy acts like we're in a recession. Where's the building, the drilling, the flow of commerce?
Wait... the data centers have frickin cooling ponds and towers now or something? Good grief...
Why would that be a bad thing compared to them just dumping their water into the sewer system?
The traditional way to water cool electronics is with a closed loop and a radiator, like a car, or a large HVAC system. It doesn't evaporate or get dumped in a sewer, it gets continually reused for a year or more, just like a car. As far as I know, all pre crypto/AI boom civilian data centers were either air cooled(overwhelming the most common, sometimes with a central system of high static pressure fans), HVAC cooled, or closed loop water cooled(and that was darn rare before crypto).
An open loop would be more like a nuclear plant. Dumping it in the sewer would also be an even less efficient open loop.
What are they going to do for cooling?
radiation
Radiation is the least efficient form of heat transfer. Those orbital data centers will cook themselves to death with their own heat, to say nothing of them receiving the full brunt of the sun's rays.
As an example- the ISS is capable of radiating 70kW of heat :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System
Shh, don’t bring the laws of physics into an emotional argument!