Not long ago I wrote a series of rants / ramblings about the flaws of US overinvestment in data center development, listed here:
Unfiltered Thoughts on Data Centers
More Unfiltered Thoughts on Data Centers (Unfinished)
Questions About a Possible Data Center Crisis
And today I recently came across an AI tool online called "Whatif Verse". It's a tool for running simulations of a city in a hypothetical future scenario. I prompted the tool to create a simulation of what it dubbed as a "Datacenter Deluge", a hypothetical supply chain crisis caused by Data Center overdevelopment:
Whatif Verse: Datacenter Deluge
The results yielded by the AI are a little more unforgiving than I would've suggested (it basically assumed maximum-possible instability, which isn't reasonable imo), but what was interesting are the long-term trends it suggested for different US companies that would result from this. I'm writing them here in case the other website shuts down.
According to the AI simulator, the companies that would win and lose from a datacenter-driven collapse of the energy grid would be:
Winners:
1. Cloudflare -- Increased demand for distributed network services
2. Caterpillar Inc. -- Boom in demand for backup generators and heavy equipment
3. Bechtel Corporation -- Massive contracts for rebuilding infrastructure
Losers:
1. Amazon Web Services -- Core business crippled by Power outages and data loss
2. TSMC -- Supply chain disrupted, impacting chip production and delivery
3. Local small businesses in tech-nation* -- Completely obliterated by prolonged power outages and economic collapse
I wouldn't personally trade stocks based off of this list, but it paints a pretty reasonable picture of what the future of the country looks like given the current path of development we're headed towards.
*"tech-nation" refers to the US; I had the AI run a simulation for an abstract trade-deficit country that invests as much as possible in datacenter infrastructure, and it dubbed this country "tech-nation".