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Situational Awareness was asinine and premised on much shorter timelines. No way you're having 500 GW of AI capacity by 2030 no matter what regulatory climate – you start hitting all sorts of earlier bottlenecks. Due to shortages in the supply chain, Nvidia and others have been forced to expand their qualifications to Chinese companies, and even those are strained now. Eg there's a huge issue with Vera Rubin PCBs. It basically doesn't matter how many chips can be produced or how eager Americans are to permit new construction. The scale of industry as such in the world is just not enough for AI capex demands.
But those other bottlenecks also create externalities for everyone else, essentially increasing the prices of any products they use anywhere down the distribution chain. Given a long enough time-span with stable demand the supply could catch up to meet it and regular consumers, but with AI advancing so rapidly we're not really giving anything any time to settle down.
well, of course it's systemically disruptive, and in particular consumers are getting priced out by competition for the capacity upstream of consumer goods. My point is solely that building up 500GW worth of AI compute in the US by 2030 is so hard physically that the anti-datacenter folks are almost a rounding error. It's a planetary supply bottleneck. I suspect that even if China could book all of TSMC they wouldn't be able to do that either.
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