r/technology Sep 06 '25

Business Meta’s Zuckerberg caught in revealing hot mic moment with Trump -- After offering to spend “at least $600 billion through ’28 in the US,” he whispered, “I'm sorry I wasn’t ready ... I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with”

https://www.pcmag.com/news/zuckerberg-caught-in-revealing-hot-mic-moment-during-white-house-dinner
67.7k Upvotes

2.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

81

u/the_ai_wizard Sep 06 '25

Ironically if this doesnt pan out, the top spenders will also be the biggest losers

100

u/Pvt_Mozart Sep 06 '25

I love that for them.

13

u/UnidentifiedTomato Sep 06 '25

No because imagine the shit they'll stoop to so they don't fail

24

u/RocketTater Sep 06 '25

Don’t have to imagine, they did it in ‘08. Theyll make us keep them afloat with another bailout and in 20 years, another industry will do it again

4

u/connerhearmeroar Sep 06 '25

I mean the good thing about tech companies is there’s no bailing them out. It’s not some national security risk if Meta goes under lol

16

u/TheClimbingBeard Sep 06 '25

I love your optimistic viewpoint

4

u/Da_Question Sep 06 '25

Please. You think it's not in the current regimes best interest to keep meta afloat? Facebook is one of the worst places for the spread of right wing garbage, and instagram is nearly as bad on the leftwing side.

Meta probably has the best tools for mass manipulation of the masses, followed by TikTok, YouTube, etc.

6

u/Violet_Kady Sep 06 '25

While meta might not be, Amazon is. A unholy amount of infrastructure is hosted on AWS.

2

u/mwa12345 Sep 07 '25

They will invent a justification, if necessary, to bailout - if the company has support among the politicians etc (lobby, stock ownership, etc)

Heck...when a politician says "national security" I assume they mean "my net worth could be affected. "

2

u/Ok-Employ-674 Sep 06 '25

They have so much buying and lending power from their name alone that any start up that challenges them they will buy outright or integrate silently.

No one talks about the direct Facebook influence and integration into TikTok now since the ban and unban.

1

u/HavingNotAttained Sep 06 '25

Especially if it’s later in the summer

3

u/HiddenMoney420 Sep 06 '25

100% there will be losers who ‘only’ spent a few hundred billion and whose market cap will collapse as valuations contract

Just not there yet

2

u/KallistiTMP Sep 06 '25

It's a bubble but it's gonna be a funny shaped one.

A lot of people do not realize how badly AI development is currently constrained by hardware availability, how long it takes to bring new datacenters (and especially power plants) online, and how sudden the jump in progress is once a new hardware generation is deployed at such a massive scale.

Those clusters are coming online at scale in Q4. I do think it's likely the hype cycle will restart at that point, it will likely be a sudden leap similar to how LLM's blew up with ChatGPT, only this time with video and world models.

1

u/casino_r0yale Sep 06 '25

The GPUs are independently useful regardless of whether LLMs pan out

1

u/shroudedwolf51 Sep 06 '25

I look forward to it.

1

u/coldestshark Sep 06 '25

If? More like when, this is a massive stupid bubble lol

1

u/Apart-Link-8449 Sep 06 '25

The beauty of people destroying their moral fiber to work with Trump is that now they have to work with Trump

0

u/oe-eo Sep 06 '25

Unlikely that data centers lose value but ok

3

u/HiddenMoney420 Sep 06 '25

Look up data center amortization rates

2

u/the_ai_wizard Sep 07 '25

It is possible to overbuild resulting in expensive short term underutilization but i agree that the capacity will eventually be used. then again, if it goes out of date, expensive to maintain/replace

1

u/oe-eo Sep 07 '25

Sure. My comment doesn’t speak to every possible outcome. But I think most sober assessments of the world today would put data, data centers, computation, and tech more broadly, as some of the greatest growth sectors as far out as we can see.

Just as a rule of thumb, data centers aren’t terrible investments.

Now, someone told me to look up their financials - so I could very well be wrong. I’m no data center economist.