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In my view, the fundamental mistake that was made and is continuing to be made by the American tech elite, and more broadly the Western neoliberal project, is holding the belief that we live in an age where ideology is no longer consequential, an era commanded solely by capital. Muslim asylum seekers will become Western liberals because we will make the Muslims rich, Russia will liberalise because Europe will make the Russians rich, China will liberalise because America will make the Chinese rich; in the real world, asylum seekers remain unassimilated, Russia invades Ukraine, and China has designs on Taiwan not because any of this makes any economic sense, but because of the might of the ideologies held by the ummah, Putinists and Chinese nationalists.
Similarly, a lot of tech elites have a post-ideology view that as long as the proles are tossed a wad of cash, they'll be allowed to do as they please; in essence, that Americans will become Western liberals because Silicon Valley will make Americans rich. In the real world, people care about things like "dignity" and "long-term benefit", and fundamentally, Americans do not believe that data-centres, and the goals of big tech and big AI, are aligned with their wellbeing and prosperity (frankly correctly, in many cases), and are not willing to be bought off by those they perceive as their enemies; complaining about object-level inaccuracies like water use or electricity is simply missing the broader point that there is no trust and no belief that data centres will benefit Americans.
It is informative, I think, to compare the attitudes of the median Chinese vs the median American on the topic of AI. While perhaps apprehensive of great changes unseen in a century, the median Chinese person believes that they are governed by those who work for the benefit of China, and that the power of technology and AI is and will be harnessed for the benefit of the people. Chinese model labs don't boast about how they're going to make everyone unemployed, or how they, and by proxy lab shareholders, are going to rule the world; Liang Wenfeng instead talks, very reasonably, about how his aim is to make a restrained profit, and how the benefits of AGI are going to accrue to society.
To be clear: I, myself, am pro data-centre, because my belief is that the best way to improve aggregate human wellbeing is unceasing development of the productive forces, and that this development is going to require building out compute to support AI and robotics. For others, it is easy to sneer at the idiocy of the proles, as @aqouta does, or believe that the outcome is overdetermined by economic forces, and that the proles will inevitably be swept aside, as @DaseindustriesLtd does.
I find these views to be somewhat shortsighted; a study of history shows clearly that people prioritize their ideological interests over their rational economic interests, and that when ideology and capital clash, ideology often comes out triumphant, at the expense of the interests of capital. Did it make economic sense for Venezuela to nationalise their oil fields and plunge the formerly richest Latin American country into poverty? Did it make economic sense for the finest across two generations of European men to die horribly across Verdun, Stalingrad and Normandy during the World Wars?
It's crucial to contextualize that all of this backlash is happening while the misery index (unemployment + inflation) is essentially completely unaffected by AI. If, or when, this begins to change, and the backlash against data centres, and more broadly against Silicon Valley and AI, continues to intensify, I think it is not unlikely that a truly bi-partisan, populist, degrowth ideology begins to consume American politics. One could imagine a scenario where the Dems take the White House in 2028, crush Musk and the broader American AI industry with the power of the state, and enforce a neo-luddite Fortress America defended by two oceans and the strategic nuclear triad.
Does this vision make any economic sense? Not at all.
Is this sustainable as a long term vision for America? Not at all; Americans never learned the lessons that the century of humiliation engraved into the Chinese psyche.
The trap is believing it matters at all whether such a vision makes economic sense. At a certain breaking point it no longer matters, the people will try and lash out however they can against those they believe to be their ideological enemies, and while a single drop of water has no power and holds no threat, no human technology is yet able to stop a tsunami. I think it is extraordinarily important, for all our sakes, that big tech and the frontier AI labs realise that they have lost the mandate of heaven instead of acting as if though they are no longer a part of society, and sincerely take steps to rectify this before it is forced upon them by the state and by the people, and we all become much worse off for it.
To be more precise, I don't think proles will be necessarily swept aside. This is one option, but it's a costly one. I strongly believe that the total DC buildout will reach hundreds of gigawatts within 10 years, and most DCs on the planet in the next years will be built by the US, at scale that's mostly constrained by supply chain bottlenecks and not popular goodwill. Some "proles" will be convinced of your more Chinese vision of the return on this investment, or grow pacified from actually using AI and seeing its utility. Others will be compensated more or less directly. Others still will just be left alone with GPUs going anywhere else, even to the orbit. There's too much money at stake, and too many routes around the problem. It will work out.
By the way, Liang Wenfeng doesn't preach "restraint" as some aesthetic principle. His argument (in that leaked and scrubbed investor call) is more like yours, and it's informed by anxiety about political pressure:
I believe Liang is a visionary. He's presciently correct on most issues, and he'll likely be recognized as correct on this one too. Anthropic already faces some political and commercial backlash. So deals will be cut.
Of note, his employees do worry about job replacement:
Deli is often representing DeepSeek publicly so you can consider this a company position, I think. In my opinion this is understated, even taking into account China's compute scarcity and marginally lesser dependence on white collar employment. They'll have to figure out how to not monopolize the benefits, it's not just a pricing or distribution decision.
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Well, isn't it convenient how unlike the others, every time the USG does something for ideological reasons, it happens to make economic sense too. If we invade Cuba, they (and we) are actually better off!
More concretely, I think many ideological opponents would rightly charge that orthogonally to any questions whether the USG's ideology is actually superior to that of NIMBYs, Putin and Maduro, there is some dynamic going on that could be glossed as
without any reference to the contents of A and B (and A happens to be "global elite capitalism"). Network effects mean that being A is advantageous, and expanding the reach of A is locally advantageous for A-ists, while punishment means expanding B is locally disadvantageous for everyone in B and network effects mean it is disadvantageous to leave A for B. However, defined like that this is obviously a coordination/equilibrium problem: if the percentages flipped everything above would hold with A and B swapped, with the only difference being that the Pope of A loses out and the Pope of B gains. You can't flip the percentages without traversing a deep trough of immiserating first yourself and then everyone, though.
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