Speculative bubbles

Microsoft has, through a combination of canceled leases, pullbacks on Statements of Qualifications, cancellations of land parcels and deliberate expiration of Letters of Intent, effectively abandoned data center expansion equivalent to over 14% of its current capacity.

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The reason I'm writing in such blunt-force terms is that I want to make it clear that Microsoft is effectively cutting its data center expansion by over a gigawatt of capacity, if not more, and it’s impossible to reconcile these cuts with the expectation that generative AI will be a massive, transformative technological phenomenon. 

I believe the reason Microsoft is cutting back is that it does not have the appetite to provide further data center expansion for OpenAI, and it’s having doubts about the future of generative AI as a whole. If Microsoft believed there was a massive opportunity in supporting OpenAI's further growth, or that it had "massive demand" for generative AI services, there would be no reason to cancel capacity, let alone cancel such a significant amount.

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Microsoft is cancelling plans to massively expand its data center capacity right at a time when OpenAI just released its most computationally-demanding model ever. How do you reconcile those two things without concluding either that Microsoft expects GPT-4.5 to be a flop, or that it’s simply unwilling to continue bankrolling OpenAI’s continued growth, or that it’s having doubts about the future of generative AI as a whole?

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Generative AI does not have meaningful mass-market use cases, and while ChatGPT may have 400 million weekly active users, as I described last week, there doesn’t appear to be meaningful consumer adoption outside of ChatGPT, mostly because almost all AI coverage inevitably ends up marketing one company: OpenAI. Argue with me all you want about your personal experiences with ChatGPT, or how you’ve found it personally useful. That doesn’t make it a product with mass-market utility, or enterprise utility, or worth the vast sums of money being ploughed into generative AI. 

The end product of today’s Western capitalism is a neo-rentier economy—precisely what
industrial capitalism and classical economists set out to replace during the Progressive Era
from the late 19th to early 20th century. A financial class has usurped the role that landlords
used to play—a class living off special privilege. Most economic rent is now paid out as
interest. This rake-off interrupts the circular flow between production and consumption,
causing economic shrinkage—a dynamic that is the opposite of industrial capitalism’s original
impulse. The “miracle of compound interest,” reinforced now by fiat credit creation, is
cannibalizing industrial capital as well as the returns to labor.

The political thrust of industrial capitalism was toward democratic parliamentary reform to
break the stranglehold of landlords on national tax systems. But today’s finance capital is
inherently oligarchic. It seeks to capture the government—first and foremost the treasury,
central bank, and courts—to enrich (indeed, to bail out) and untax the banking and financial
sector and its major clients: real estate and monopolies. This is why financial “technocrats”
(proxies and factotums for high finance) were imposed in Greece, and why Germany opposed a
public referendum on the European Central Bank’s austerity program.