By bizn_fun 
Amanda Brock, the head of business organisation OpenUK, shares this view. “The data centre myth will be a bubble that will burst over time, I think,” she tells me. Although she didn’t want to put a date on it.
She thinks derelict buildings and closed shops should be repurposed into small data centres instead.
Some are looking a little further afield than high streets and cities: space.
“Space offers a unique opportunity to rethink data structure, where small, scalable data centres in orbit can deliver efficiency, performance and flexibility,” says Avi Shabtai, the CEO of Ramon Space, one firm developing the technology.
Back on terra firma, Brock agrees with Perplexity’s Srinivas that fewer data centres will be required, and that she instead thinks “processing will move to a handheld device, or a set-top box, or a router in your home”.
This might also become more likely if it’s not only the data centres that are shrinking – but also the AI tools themselves.
There’s been huge hype around Large Language Models – massive, powerful AI models trained on vast amounts of data, which run the AI chatbots we use to generate content. But we have also become familiar with their tendency to make mistakes.
It happens in part because of their incredibly broad remit.
As the AI ethics campaigner Ed Newton Rex once put it to me: an AI tool designed to spot signs of cancer does not also need to be able to write song lyrics in the style of Taylor Swift.