Is the AI Boom Heading for a Bust? What the Dot-Com Bubble Tells Us

WSJ Tech News Briefing

The Wall Street Journal

News, Tech News

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Artificial intelligence is generating a ton of money and buzz. But could we be in a bubble? WSJ reporter Rolfe Winklers tells us what lessons we can learn from the early 2000s. Plus, can traditional data-storage companies keep up with AI’s demands? WSJ reporter John Keilman explores innovations in hard-disk drives. Shara Tibken hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Here's the truth about AI. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. Service Now puts AI to work for people across your business, removing friction and frustration for your employees, supercharging productivity for your developers, providing intelligent tools for your service agents to make customers happier, all built into a single platform you can
0:22.0	use right now. That's why the world works with ServiceNow. Visit ServiceNow.com
0:27.9	slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Wednesday, March 12th. I'm Shara Tipkin for the Wall Street Journal.
0:40.2	Artificial intelligence is fueling a boom in data centers, but some traditional storage companies are scrambling to adapt to AI's needs. How do hard drive makers keep up?
0:50.8	Then, we explore what the dot-com bust can teach us about today's AI boom.
0:55.8	WSJ reporter Rolf Winkler tells us all about bubbles.
1:03.0	But first, AI requires a lot of data to work, and that information has to be stored somewhere.
1:11.5	Data centers last year spent an estimated $40 billion on storage devices, according to the
1:17.6	consulting firm IDC.
1:19.8	That's expected to grow by 31% over the next two years.
1:24.9	Storage companies like Seagate hope data centers choose their hard disk drives,
1:29.8	but the industry is facing an uncertain future as competing solid state drives get faster and
1:35.6	cheaper. Here to explain is WSJ reporter John Kielman. John, hard drives have limitations like moving
1:43.4	parts, but they're also fairly cheap.
1:46.2	Solid state drives or SSDs are faster, but they cost more.
1:49.8	What's fueling this push to have better storage options?
1:53.4	Well, the push is coming from the demands of AI, which require stupendous amounts of data to train their models.
2:02.9	And at the same time, all of these companies that have invested in data centers
2:06.7	do not want to add to their footprint, to their square footage,
2:11.2	to increase their ability to store data,
2:14.7	which means all of these devices that are in a data center need to be able
2:21.0	to hold more and more data. So both on the hard disk drive side and on the solid state drive
	...

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