- IBM’s CEO walked through some napkin math on data centers— and said that there’s “no way” to turn a profit at current costs.
- “$8 trillion of CapEx means you need roughly $800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest,” Arvind Krishna told “Decoder.”
- Krishna was skeptical of that current tech would reach AGI, putting the likelihood between 0-1%.
Most corporate-facing businesses have some sense of sanity because they know every purchase of their product is going to be scrutinized to hell by a team of MBA accountants. They’ve got to actually meet expectations versus consumer business which can be sold (and defended) on marketing And hype alone
I mean, a lot of internal corporate “AI” systems I’ve seen are ChatGPT wrappers, and total messes. But they get approval and funding.
Another odd thing is that IBM’s hardly ‘selling’ here. These are basically open source contributions for PR, with the hope that they’re used internally or in their other businesses I guess. But it’s quite low-key for PR.