Let's say that tomorrow every company selling AI inference goes bankrupt.
Investors are devastated (because they lost most of their investment). They
loudly proclaim, "I'm never investing in AI ever again, and no one else should
either." Even if no investor anywhere is willing to build a
new one, there
would
still be about half a trillion dollars worth of recently-completed AI
data centers. New investors are going to buy them from the bankruptcy courts
(which is how the devastated investors get
some small fraction of their
investment back). Because most of the cost of providing AI inference is the
cost of the GPUs, it costs only about one tenth or one eighth of what it cost
to build it to
operate an AI data center over the lifetime of the data
center. (Most of the cost is electricity.)
>Is an arbitrary service profitable enough to cover opex AND burn down the
massive capex financing?
The new investors that buy the already-built data centers for pennies on the
dollar have no obligation to "burn down the massive capex financing". The
obligation to "burn down" or service any debt was erased by the
bankruptcy judge. This is how bankruptcy works and has always worked.
>Is an arbitrary service profitable enough to cover opex AND burn down the massive capex financing?
The new investors that buy the already-built data centers for pennies on the dollar have no obligation to "burn down the massive capex financing". The obligation to "burn down" or service any debt was erased by the bankruptcy judge. This is how bankruptcy works and has always worked.