Does a Bear Shit in an Overheating Data Centre?
Instead of Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, you’ve got Sam Altman
So here we are, staggering through the last days of 2025 like a drunk trying to find his keys in a car park, and apparently we’ve spent the past few years building the world’s most expensive digital casino. Except this time, nobody’s winning. Not yet, anyway. Possibly not ever. But don’t worry, because according to venture capitalists with the dead-eyed optimism of cult members, we’re in the “early innings.” If this is the early innings, the late innings are going to look like a damp Tuesday in Swindon.
The news, such as it is, goes like this: America has basically mortgaged its entire economy to the Church of Artificial Intelligence. Two-thirds of GDP growth in the first half of this year came from AI spending.
Not from people buying things they need, or even things they don’t need but quite fancy.
No, from corporations hurling money at semiconductors and data centres like they’re feeding coins into a fruit machine that’s never paid out but might, MIGHT, if you just keep going. It’s the economic equivalent of a bloke betting his house on a horse called “So, so.”
Nobody’s making any actual money from this yet. Well, apart from Nvidia, who are essentially the arms dealer in this particular gold rush, flogging pickaxes to idiots whilst staying well clear of the mine shaft themselves.
ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users. That’s roughly half the population of Europe and North America combined, all tapping away at their keyboards asking an algorithmic parrot to write their emails. And what’s that worth? About thirteen billion dollars a year. Which sounds impressive until you realise Meta makes that much in a month from showing you adverts for things you don’t want whilst you scroll through photos of your cousin’s disappointing barbecue.
The problem, according to people who understand maths better than I do, is that AI doesn’t scale like normal software. When you use ChatGPT, somewhere in Nevada or wherever, a server farm the size of Slough starts screaming and sweating like a fat man in a sauna, burning through enough electricity to power a medium-sized town. Every. Single. Time.
And yet we’re told this is fine, this is normal, this is just how paradigm shifts work. “We haven’t seen productivity gains yet,” says one expert, with the cheery tone of someone explaining that the Titanic is merely experiencing a slight tilt. Another ventures that we’re still “experimenting and learning,” which is precisely what I’d say if I’d just set fire to a trillion dollars and needed to explain it to the shareholders.
The optimists wheel out the usual comparisons. The internet didn’t make money immediately either, they say. Fair point. But the internet wasn’t also spending more per year than the GDP of most countries whilst delivering, as far as anyone can tell, a slightly better autocomplete and some deeply concerning art of people with too many fingers.
What we’ve got here is a situation where 95% of businesses investing in AI aren’t making a penny from it. That’s a faith-based initiative, not business. It’s economic prosperity theology. If you just believe hard enough and throw enough money at the glowing rectangle, surely, SURELY, it’ll start pissing out profits like a broken ATM.
And we can’t stop now. According to David Sacks, who’s apparently the White House czar for this nonsense, “a reversal would risk recession.” Brilliant. We’ve built an economy on the premise that we MUST keep shovelling money into the AI furnace or the whole thing collapses. It’s like discovering you’ve been driving a bus that explodes if it drops below 50mph, except instead of Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, you’ve got Sam Altman promising the bus will definitely sprout wings if you just keep accelerating.
Look, I’m not saying AI is useless. It’s clearly not. I use it. You use it. It writes marketing copy and answers stupid questions and occasionally makes something genuinely useful before hallucinating that Abraham Lincoln invented the dishwasher. It’s a tool. A very expensive tool that’s currently eating the world’s electrical grid and making about as much money as a lemonade stand run by children.
But the thing about bubbles is that they’re really, really fun until they’re not. And when this one pops, if it pops, we won’t just lose some tech stocks and a few billion in venture capital.
We’ll have built an economy so dependent on the promise of AI profits that the absence of them will feel like someone’s switched off gravity. Gary Marcus, one of the few people willing to be a miserable sod about all this, reckons “it’s not going to be pretty when the music stops.” I’d go further. When the music stops, it’s going to look like a wedding reception where everyone’s just realised the groom’s already married.
So what’s the answer? Buggered if I know. Keep using AI where it’s actually useful. Stop pretending it’s the second coming rendered in Python. And maybe, just maybe, stop building data centres the size of small nations until we’ve figured out whether anyone’s actually willing to pay for this stuff.
In the meantime, we’re all passengers on a runaway bus being driven by people who insist they know where we’re headed.
Hold on tight. Or don’t. Either way, this is going to be a proper shambles.
Will AI ever make big profits? Experts weigh in as bubble fears loom: ABC News
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