The wastefulness is akin to having multiple private jets on standby, or workers coming in to a fishbowl office to be gawked at, or massive datacenters to be used as social "proof".
Its all a fucking capitalistic farce to display to other rich elite that "Look at how much clout I have! I can make these peons dance around and do my bidding! Im a slave-owner!"
https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/116991627711001827
He noted that that Silicon Valley doesnt really want to SOLVE problems. They want to find already-solved problems with problem matching. And of course, we just throw more people and more compute instead of optimization and understanding.
The Chinese are being actively constrained with bullshit politics around a second Red Scare moment. And, well, they're winning. A lot.
No, it's an attempt to form an artificial moat by buying all the world's GPUs and memory.