I read an interesting piece a couple days ago, about the death of pennies.
It seems that we kept making pennies because stores needed pennies to make change, except nobody used pennies - they just ended up in jars or couch cushions or kids piggy banks or penny dishes at cash registers or wherever, which meant we needed more pennies. We needed more pennies because nobody actually used pennies! So each year businesses would say “We need more pennies”, which the mint would dutifully make at a cost of over 3¢ each, because nobody used pennies and we needed pennies.
Now data centers and chips are a long jump from that, but I wonder if all these people building data centers (which aren’t profitable) and which keep consuming vast amounts of money (because nobody can make them profitable) means we need to keep building more data centers using ever more chips and servers, because the businesses that build them need to have them, even though not a lot of people are using them. So to make sure there’s enough, they’re taking on debt, as opposed to just robbing cash-flows, because they have to build more, because they think they need more, even though it appears we have enough; more than enough, really, at least for now.
But nobody can stop building them, because the other guy is building them, and you don’t want to get caught with too few, like pennies in the cash register.
OK, big stretch, but I think it’s funny that pennies were so expensive that we stopped making them, but AI is so expensive that…we’re making more of them. Strange in a strange land, apologies to Heinlein.