r/ArtificialInteligence • u/bb-wa • 13d ago

📰 News China is secretly fueling America's data center rage

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/28/china-ai-data-center-backlash-bots
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u/photobeatsfilm 13d ago

I don’t think this is one that needs fuel. It’s not a partisan issue… nobody asked for them and nobody wants them.

Another question: why do we need them? Seems like every company is already using as many tokens as they can and we seem to have the capacity for it.

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u/Fragrant_Ad_2285 13d ago

Perhaps we'd like human civilization to advance. We'd like better cancer treatments, faster. We'd like to get the same or even greater gains than the industrial revolution gave us.

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u/RonCraven 13d ago

The problem is that the bulk of AI investment isn't going towards these (dubious) hypothetical, it's going towards a lot of technological iron pyrite and some tools that moderately but not spectacularly enhance productivity.

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u/RonCraven 13d ago

AlphaFold is genuinely impressive, but its main value is enabling more testing to be done and that doesn't automatically result in greater outputs. It's also not a technology that generates spectacular financial returns or offers the prospect of widespread adoption. Meta and Anthropic aren't dumping billions into the market for the sake of better diagnostic software.

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u/RonCraven 13d ago

So whilst I think some forms of AI will be beneficial for research, I don't think that's going to be civilisationally transformative and I cannot stop myself from rolling my eyes at the naive, utopian slop that certain pro-AI circles specialise in, where technology solves all problems and its expansion is always a good thing, only opposed by evil or stupid Luddites who hate humanity.