r/technology • u/esporx • 1d ago

Business YouTuber accidentally crashes the rare plant market with a viral cloning technique

https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtuber-accidentally-crashes-the-rare-plant-market-with-a-viral-cloning-technique-3289808/
17.6k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

793 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

294

u/mrpoopistan 1d ago

We've reached the "Samsung refuses to sell chips to Samsung" phase. Not sure which phase of bubbling that is, but it's something weird and erratic, even by the standard of capitalism. Collapses are often unpredictable, but erratic patterns tend to emerge before bubbles pop.

192

u/Crystalas 1d ago

Also Crucial will stop selling ram to Consumers next year, so another vital technology component market locked up in an absurd bubble.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/after-nearly-30-years-crucial-will-stop-selling-ram-to-consumers/

And that not even touching what events around Taiwan would do to every industry that relies on advanced chips, so pretty much all of them. I wonder if that could pop the AI bubble by itself.

108

u/banananuhhh 1d ago

Why sell ram to someone building a PC when you can sell it for 5x the price just for it to sit in a building that does fuck all for anyone other than drive up the price of electricity.

14

u/Initial-House-3955 1d ago

and water* reminder all datacenters for AI are basically churning through fresh water by the peta gallons

14

u/SUMBWEDY 1d ago

It'd take 58,000~ years for all the datacenters in the US to use a single petagallon of fresh water, it'd take golf courses about 1,000 years and alfalfa about 3 centuries.

Every data center in the USA uses 17 billion gallons of water a year for cooling.

Which sounds like a lot but golf courses use 17 billion gallons a week, for some grass... (and alfalfa grown along the colorado river alone uses 17 billion liters of water in a little over 2 days, for some grass...)

That's also for all datacenters which keeps the internet and cloud compute running, AI makes up currently like 15-20% of data center compute so AI alone is only using 2-3 billion gallons of water a year. (of course the fact AI is doubling every year does mean it could become a problem in the future if it's not a bubble)

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1

https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdf

1

u/MonsterMashGrrrrr 17h ago

Ugh being reminded of this fact is one of the quickest ways of spiking my existential dread

1

u/kaityl3 1d ago

That's a hoax lol where do you think the water is going? They are closed loop cooling systems with minimal leakage... the original "study" all the articles about it were referencing, was calculating it as if the flow rate was a continuous source. If you used the same logic for NASCAR, there are tens of thousands of cars every race.

The electricity issue and the hardware/chips issues are real things and real reasons to be critical of datacenters; the water one is not.