Electronics Weekly
Last week’s converts to the Jensen pitch appeared to be bigwigs at the EU, including the flighty French president, who expressed their need for Jensen‘s concept of “AI sovereignty” which holds that every country, because of its individual cultural characteristics, needs to have enough datacentre capacity to develop and run the AI programmes its citizens create and use.
The week before it was the Middle Easterners who appeared to have sucked up the AI sovereignty pitch and were falling over themselves to spend hundreds of billions on ‘AI Gigafactories’ with allocations of hundreds of thousands of GPUs to be supplied by Nvidia.
Alongside the Sovereignty Pitch is deployed the Fear Pitch that the Chinese are gearing up to build AI Gigafactories all along the Digital Silk Road using, horror of horrors, Chinese chips instead of Nvidia’s.
It’s a good sales pitch but is it rational for the government to spend our money on AI Gigafactories? A steady market for AI programmes is not yet established; it really doesn’t matter where AI programmes are developed or run; datacentres don’t employ many people; their equipment is unlikely to be locally sourced; the servers need replacing every five years or so; the electricity costs are sky-high and put pressure on local electricity grids and the current enthusiasm for datacentres may well lead to over-building which will create surplus capacity which can be bought cheaply.
When Jensen met the PM a week or so ago he told Sir Keir that the UK has “the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure.”
That’s the usual way the UK plays it – we let others do the grunt work while we do the brainy bit – that’s where the value-add is.
Every dictator craves his very own artificial intelligence to control his population, fight wars, manage currency, and exploit resources.