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During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, has always tried to keep up with the latest trends, and now this is underlined by new research showing that fears over cheap Chinese Artificial Intelligence (AI) models may be overblown, and that plans for data centres supplying the more expensive versions are still increasing apace.
The more you THINK you know, the greater is the realisation that there is an ever-widening chasm of things you DON’T KNOW!
When I started in journalism in 1983, technology consisted of a typewriter and a phone.
Now, though, it is a multi-billion pound industry which changes ALL THE TIME!
Let’s start with what (I think) is happening today.
In December a Chinese firm, DeepSeek, earned itself headlines for cutting the dollar cost of training their Artificial Intelligence (AI) model down from $61.6 million (the price of Llama 3.1, produced by Meta) to just $6 million.
This meant the share prices of more traditional computer chip companies (such as Nvidia) nosedived (although they have since recovered).
Yet it seems that this sort of development hasn’t hindered the moves to building ever more data centres supplying traditional (if I can use that word!) AI models, and this is just the start because there isn’t enough of them so we are at the beginning…
Meta and America’s other three big cloud-service providers (requiring ‘data centres’) —Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft—splashed an incredible $180 billion on infrastructure last year.
Add in spending by smaller tech firms, telecoms providers, big enterprises and data-centre operators such as Digital Realty and Equinix, and the figure rises to a staggering $465 billion.
Land, buildings and peripheral gear such as electrical equipment make up about 30 per cent of that, with chips, server racks, networking kit and the like accounting for the rest.
Cash-strong private-equity firms such as Blackstone have been lured in by the spending boom, undertaking a record $70 billion-worth of data-centre deals last year.
These data centres use a vast amount of energy, so supply units are being built, and contracts signed with utility majors.
This will go on as well changing the face of everything (including journalism), because companies can’t get enough data centres.
Just 2.8 per cent of existing data centre space is unoccupied in North America, and the data centre buildings are often ‘pre-leased’ even before they are constructed – typically for 10 or 15 years.
So journalists like me should forget ever going back to a typewriter.
i imagine you’ll still have to phone people though…
The memories of Phil’s, astonishing award-winning career in journalism (when he used a typewriter, phone and notebook at the start) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
Tomorrow – as more doubts emerge about the safety of the conviction of Lucy Letby with The Economist newspaper now declaring it is “questionable” and that “Her case exposes deep problems with British justice”, The Eye re-publish our story from earlier in the month about the growing controversy.
