The absolute best data centers today should be written into history as a dark dark stain on the progression of humanity. It is a sign that no matter how stupid we have been up until now, we managed to find that hole has no bottom.
Consider this... The reason we need data centers that massive today is because the tech isn't ready.
NVidia B300 filled racks using 100kw each are barely capable of running modern frontier models. Even if we designed more powerful chips that could do the job, there isn't enough silicon wafers produced in the world to do the job. Even the most amazing semiconductor technologies on earth are not good enough. Consider that even if we could build 1TB HBM4 NPUs, the time it would take to generate a token on a transformer that large would be slow.
What we know
Transformers will leave the data center between 2030-2032 as it will never make sense to run transformer inference in racks. It's at least 1000x less green than local inference.
Intel, AMD, NVidia, Apple and every RISC-V/ARM chip supplier on earth is 100% focused on making local inference the thing.
We will soon stop training massive models that start becoming obsolete the moment the last parameter is fed. Even now, Qwen 3.8 27b is good enough for a year at least (first model to do this).
For LLMs, we'll just stop wasting cycles on huge networks and will focus more on stronger harnesses attached to better data sources.
Cloud AI will be more about acting as data providers. Models will become reasoning engines, the "smarts" will come from things like vector databases.
Vector databases will use kilowatts, not megawatts. Data storage will be much smaller.
Things like Intel's dead Optane product will become the future of datacenters. Google Search, Microsoft Bing, maybe Baidu are the best positioned companies for what comes next and they don't need 100KW per rack to deliver. If I were to enter this segment, I would pair a customized KLV object query engine onto a 1024 bit wide ecc memory bus and connect it with low cost networking (think Intel's Ethernet fabric tech). Then add a super capacitor to flush to flash on power loss... Or just hope Optane comes back. Superfast, massive, token based vector databases are the future of cloud LLM
What's next. In 3-5 years, every single rack in every single AI data center is trash
This is fact.
Even now H100 racks should be heading to scrap.
The chips are slow, they use old heat spreader tech, they get almost no performance per watt compared to B300. They are much harder to cool. They have so little VRAM it takes piles of them to run newer models. PCIe data center GPUs were always irresponsible purchases. SXM GPUs only run on special systems Noone but high end data centers can even run.
Consider that every single B300 or older equipped rack on earth is landfill in 3-5 years.
By then, the world will have overprovisioned RAM, we'll have moved 2-3 generations of cooling forward, we'll have designed denser racks, started employing all the awesome tech China built to work around lack of EUV... No really, Korean companies are already licensing CXMT tech for wafer stacking. We will have moved to lower fresh water depen....
You know what? It is going to just be cheaper to bankrupt the shell corporations who own the current data centers than to upgrade them to new tech. Besides, the environmental issues will be such a mess. Imagine trying to dispose of that much fr4 epoxy without causing environmental disasters? It's probably at least as much epoxy as the total mass of the twin towers.
I can keep ranting but I promise this, there isn't a single piece of tech in the most modern AI data center on earth that is worth using in 5 years... Not even the racks. It's all garbage.