Reddit theory: the AI 'slowdown' talk masks a coming compute, power and datacenter crunch
maxpayne07 · reddit · 2026-09-13
A viral Reddit post argues the recent chorus of 'responsible slowdown' talk from Anthropic, OpenAI and Musk coincides with labs hitting hard physical compute limits.
Key numbers cited:
- Anthropic: 1M+ AWS Trainium2 chips, an up-to-5 GW Amazon deal worth $100B+ over 10 years, next-gen Google/Broadcom TPU capacity from 2027, plus all of Colossus 1 (300+ MW, 220k+ Nvidia GPUs).
- OpenAI: behind the Ohio AI campus with 4.25 GW initial IT load from Nvidia/SB Energy.
- Musk's Colossus: 200k H100s, roadmap toward 1M GPUs.
The author also notes OpenAI's own admission that coding agents have pushed experiments-per-researcher to an all-time high, with compute increasingly the binding bottleneck. Conclusion: safety concerns and competitive slowing are real, but so is the physical crunch — 'you can't pip install 5 gigawatts' — and behind the speeches, every lab's engineers are working around the clock on cheaper, less compute-hungry training.
Related event: Amodei, Altman and Musk unite on slowing AI, sparking debate over motives(62 posts)→
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