Google must double AI serving capacity every 6 months to meet demand, AI infrastructure boss tells employees

[LiberalArkie]

NOV 21 20257:30 AM EST

Google ’s AI infrastructure boss told employees that the company has to double its serving capacity every six months in order to meet demand for artificial intelligence services.

At an all-hands meeting on Nov. 6, Amin Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, gave a presentation, viewed by CNBC, titled “AI Infrastructure,” which included a slide on “AI compute demand.” The slide said, “Now we must double every 6 months.... the next 1000x in 4-5 years.”

“The competition in AI infrastructure is the most critical and also the most expensive part of the AI race,” Vahdat said at the meeting, where Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Anat Ashkenazi also took questions from employees.

The presentation was delivered a week after Alphabet reported better-than-expected third-quarter results and raised its capital expenditures forecast for the second time this year, to a range of $91 billion to $93 billion, followed by a “significant increase” in 2026. Hyperscaler peers Microsoft, Amazon and Meta also boosted their capex guidance, and the four companies now expect to collectively spend more than $380 billion this year.

Snip

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/21/google-must-double-ai-serving-capacity-every-6-months-to-meet-demand.html

[OC375]

1. Profit Has No Ceiling

A.I.'s main product is investors, and investors are attracted based on hitting B.S. A.I. benchmarks that are designed to hype the technology. Investors = profits for those who earn movey from the valuation of their company.

There is no ceiling for benchmarks, and as such there is no ceiling for profit. There's no, "once we hit $1 billion, we're good here", or "once we build the hospital, the investment venture has completed it's goal". Here, someone else will hit that next benchmark eventually, and ias such your nvestors will eventually move their money (and your profit) there if you don't keep growing.

Investors don't really care what the investment is for, only that they continue to get profit, every month. In perpetuity.

I'd expect A.I. to continue growing indefinately as there is no end goal to it other than perpetual growth, and perpetual profit, which by definition have no end as their goals.

As such, A.I. can never stop expanding.

[edhopper]

6. Except they don't make money with it

And eventually the bubble bursts.
You can't keep pouring billions into something that makes no profit.

[Cheezoholic]

2. And OpenAI says it needs over 20 gigawatts of "compute" (new keyword to add to AI) by 2033... like Ive said before

This is insanity. A nuke plant puts out a gigawatt. Where the fuck do these assholes think they're going to get this electricity (yes I know, us)? There's a reason we didn't fly planes with steam engines. Could we have? Sure but they would've been the 10x's the size of the Titanic. There comes a point when "could" we becomes "should" we. Yes we "could" build the infrastructure to power these "steam" computing centers but what we "should" do is wait and invest in smarter and way way more efficient ways to do this via software and hardware.

There are already datacenters completely built just sitting there waiting for a plug and these fuck wad tech baby monsters want a gazillion more of OUR dollars to keep building them. A fraud that makes 2007 look like a bump.
Key phrase here...
We don't NEED these, they WANT them.


FF!!!

[indusurb]

3. This is one reason AI is a bubble

Such power and water demands are unsustainable and ultimately unachievable. Current power consumption in the US is approx. 1400 gigawatts, nowhere near enough to sustain the growth wanted for AI. Electric plants take years, even a decade to build depending on the type of plant. Thus, they can't be built fast enough.

A large data center uses upwards of five million gallons of water a day, the equivalent of a town with 50,000 people. Again, with the sort of expansion that these people are talking about these demands are simply unsustainable.

If they pursue this plan AI with destroy us all, all to have a machine that thinks for us, and does so poorly.

[hunter]

4. These guys are smoking crack in the fireworks factory.

I wouldn't want to live anywhere near the place.

[lame54]

5. Sucking up our energy

[misanthrope]

7. "Move fast, break things" will be the epitaph for our civilization

Likely our species and maybe the ecosphere.

[NameAlreadyTaken]

8. Who even wants AI?

[KentuckyWoman]

9. This reminded me to turn off smart features

I use gmail and only found out recently they updated at some point to opt everyone in on taking your private contacts and information for AI learning. They probably already have everything I could offer, but I turned it off anyway.