alt Hacker NewsJust to mention one thing, helium -which is a necessity for chip production- is a byproduct of LNG production. And 20% of that is just gone (Qatar) and the question is how long it will take to get that back. So not only a chip shortage because of AI buying chips in huge volumes but also because production will be hampered.
Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.
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Fusion fuel is so energy dense that fusion plants will never produce industrially meaningful amounts of helium.
Helium is 5 parts per million of the atmosphere. It should be possible to extract it, and thus never run out.
Doing some googling yields an estimated cost of about $25,000 per kg. I can see why extraction from wells is preferred.
Considering my helium-filled hard drives a strategic reserve now
> Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.
Whenever I read about fusion, I get reminded of a note in the sci-fi book trilogy The Night's Dawn. In that story, the introduction of cheap fusion energy had not cured global warming on Earth but instead sped it up with all the excess heat from energy-wasting devices.
What matters is not what we don't have, but how we manage that which we do have.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand