Speaker 1: Mike Dubuski, ABC News Technology reporter with us this morning.
Speaker 2: It is a Tech Tuesday. Good morning, Mike.
Speaker 3: Good morning, Happy tech Tuesday.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm always a pleasure. Okay. A story about Apple,
Speaker 2: and when Apple.
Speaker 1: Invests, it's generally not forty six dollars, it's some big dollars.
Speaker 2: And in this case, five billion dollars.
Speaker 3: What's that about, Yeah, half a trillion dollars. You're absolutely
Speaker 3: right that Apple is not making investments to the tune
Speaker 3: of like scratch off cards or anything like that. These
Speaker 3: are high dollar investments, specifically in American tech infrastructure, and
Speaker 3: what that essentially means is that they are in part
Speaker 3: building actual infrastructure. They are building a factory in Texas
Speaker 3: that is designed to make AI servers, they say. But
Speaker 3: they're also going to go on a hiring spree. They
Speaker 3: plan to hire about twenty thousand new employees over the
Speaker 3: course of the next four years. Those employees are going
Speaker 3: to be focused on research and development, silicon investing, and
Speaker 3: of course, artificial intelligence, which is exactly what this is
Speaker 3: all about. This is a major bet on the future
Speaker 3: of AI. Apple has their own branding for their generative
Speaker 3: artificial intelligence tools called Apple Intelligence This seems to be
Speaker 3: the technology, the sort of back end stuff that's going
Speaker 3: to underpin the future of Apple intelligence.
Speaker 4: Now, when you talk about servers and building servers and
Speaker 4: these huge warehouses, I mean we're talking hundreds of thousands
Speaker 4: of dollars one hundred thousands of square feet jammed full
Speaker 4: of computer gear and takes enormous amount of energy and
Speaker 4: incredible air conditioning systems.
Speaker 2: Are they building those at a rapid rate?
Speaker 1: Because what the Internet is growing, or it was growing astronomically,
Speaker 1: has that slowed down?
Speaker 2: And is that building still going up? That kind of building?
Speaker 3: Yeah, what you're talking about there are data centers which
Speaker 3: are increasingly becoming these really central pieces of the tech
Speaker 3: puzzle in the United States. And what the data center
Speaker 3: is is essentially, like you said, a big building full
Speaker 3: of computer servers, just a big sort of warehouse style thing,
Speaker 3: not many people in, really a security guard, a couple
Speaker 3: of technical officials. But companies came to those buildings and say, hey,
Speaker 3: I want a row of computers or i want this
Speaker 3: little neighborhood of computer servers. I'm going to rent that out.
Speaker 3: And these data center companies basically act as landlords and
Speaker 3: they say, yeah, you can have this for this price,
Speaker 3: and then you get all this computing power. The reason
Speaker 3: for that is because when you open an app on
Speaker 3: your phone or you try to run a program on
Speaker 3: your computer, oftentimes it's not your computer or your phone
Speaker 3: that's actually running that technology. They're offloading some of that
Speaker 3: work to these data centers, in part because the programs
Speaker 3: that we rely on every day are just so computer intensive,
Speaker 3: just so energy intensive. So that's why these data centers
Speaker 3: are important and are actual Intelvince generative. AI is very
Speaker 3: computer intensive to a degree that we really have before
Speaker 3: with other existing technologies. So these data centers are becoming
Speaker 3: really important. And with Apple's five hundred billion dollar investment,
Speaker 3: part of that money is going to this factory to
Speaker 3: build these AI servers in partnership with this Taiwanese firm
Speaker 3: called fox Con. These are the servers that are going
Speaker 3: to go into data centers that are springing up across
Speaker 3: the country. So that's kind of the idea here. Some
Speaker 3: of these data centers are owned and operated by companies
Speaker 3: Whole Cloths, Apple, Microsoft, Google all have their own, but
Speaker 3: there's also like third party data centers that are kind
Speaker 3: of like the landlords, right. They offer the energy they
Speaker 3: offer the air conditioning, and then you as the tech company,
Speaker 3: go in and place your own computers kind of where
Speaker 3: you want them. So the really interesting piece of the
Speaker 3: sort of back end of the American tech infrastructure, and
Speaker 3: one that clearly is coming into clear focus with Apples
Speaker 3: half a trillion dollar investment and also similar investments from
Speaker 3: companies like open Ai.
Speaker 1: All right, so Apple, Well I'll talk about Amazon in
Speaker 1: a minute, because that's our next segment.
Speaker 2: But when you tech about these.
Speaker 1: Data centers, is it like a clearing house of information,
Speaker 1: much like you have a clearing house of banking. The
Speaker 1: Swift system where everybody comes together and then the money
Speaker 1: flows out under Swift is the same thing happening here.
Speaker 3: So it depends, right, It depends on what the data
Speaker 3: center is used for. As we said, some companies own
Speaker 3: their own use them for the purposes. For example, some
Speaker 3: data centers might be just used for cloud computing at Google, right,
Speaker 3: they might be used to underpin Google Drive. Similarly, Apple
Speaker 3: might use the data center to underpin iCloud or Apple
Speaker 3: Intelligence or some combination of the technologies that need all
Speaker 3: of this energy.
Speaker 1: Really depends how big a how big a system is
Speaker 1: this because we don't hear much about this.
Speaker 2: Is this one of those zillion dollar industries.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's huge and it's growing. And in fact, I
Speaker 3: visited a data center that was bringing up in Orangeburg,
Speaker 3: New York, which is about a half an hour north
Speaker 3: of New York City, in the fall, and it was,
Speaker 3: you know, under construction at the time. They were investing
Speaker 3: you know, several hundred million dollars in this facility as
Speaker 3: a company called Data Bank that was spinning this up,
Speaker 3: and it was set to open at about two months.
Speaker 3: And I got to say, when I was walking around,
Speaker 3: you believed that, you know, it's like these things are
Speaker 3: getting a lot of attention, a lot of construction power
Speaker 3: is going into these sort of facilities. As I said,
Speaker 3: they're just basically big warehouses that you know, you put
Speaker 3: computers in, not a ton of people. You need the
Speaker 3: staff to run them. But there's another concern that comes
Speaker 3: along with all this technology, which is energy consumption. Right,
Speaker 3: because one, you need energy, need electricity to pull from
Speaker 3: the grid to run the computers in your service, but
Speaker 3: you also need to run air conditioning and cooling units
Speaker 3: to keep those computers cool and to keep them functioning.
Speaker 3: So they are big draws on the energy grid, and
Speaker 3: that is something that we haven't really reckoned with yet.
Speaker 3: We haven't really figured out a solution to making the
Speaker 3: things climate friendly and environmentally friendly. You can imagine as
Speaker 3: AI spins up and becomes more prominent, that is going
Speaker 3: to become an increasing concern.
Speaker 1: All right, I want to go back for a moment
Speaker 1: to Amazon, the Amazon story where you reported that Amazon
Speaker 1: is going to hire twenty thousand new employees regarding that
Speaker 1: huge AI tech investment. Now, Amazon had a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of layoffs, and I don't know how many are those
Speaker 1: people going to go back to work, and how.
Speaker 2: Does that connect with twenty thousand new employees.
Speaker 3: That's a very good question. I'm not sure, but they
Speaker 3: certainly are spinning up a whole new slate of technologies,
Speaker 3: and that is kind of what you know they are
Speaker 3: touting this week. There's this big event in New York
Speaker 3: City scheduled for tomorrow. It's expected to be an event
Speaker 3: all about Alexa, which is, of course Amazon's very popular
Speaker 3: voice assistant. Back in twenty twenty three, Amazon said that
Speaker 3: they were going to make this revamp of Alexa toy
Speaker 3: kind of fallen behind some competitors like Google Assistant that
Speaker 3: are out there just in terms of functionality and ease
Speaker 3: of use in what have you. And Amazon says that
Speaker 3: by adding generative artificial intelligence to this technology, it's going
Speaker 3: to get a lot easier to use, and you can
Speaker 3: imagine that is going to have a lot of people
Speaker 3: on the back end working to make sure that this
Speaker 3: technology doesn't go awry as we've seen it in the past.
Speaker 3: You know, these generative artificial intelligence models often make things up,
Speaker 3: they hallucinate, they get things wrong, and that requires sort
Speaker 3: of moderation teams and engineering teams to be on call
Speaker 3: in order to figure that out. We're going to get
Speaker 3: a better look at it tomorrow to see if that
Speaker 3: actually plays in the real world the way that Amazon
Speaker 3: wants it to. I think there's a lot of risk here,
Speaker 3: especially when you consider the sort of unreliability of some
Speaker 3: of these AI systems, but that is what they say
Speaker 3: is going to make this voice a system a lot
Speaker 3: more competitive going forward.
Speaker 1: All right, And what I normally do whenever we talk
Speaker 1: about a Lex is I refer to those of you
Speaker 1: that are listening who have an Alexa in your house
Speaker 1: and you have kids asleep.
Speaker 2: Alexa Louder louder.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly. You got to give the disclaimer every
Speaker 3: time you do a voice assistant segment. You know, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: We've we've lit up all the Alexa devices around southern
Speaker 3: California this morning.
Speaker 2: Yeh's lovely. I love it. I love it. Hey.
Speaker 1: In terms of the new technology, it's I have friends,
Speaker 1: my daughter as a matter of fact, and my daughter's
Speaker 1: roommate who had a great job at Amazon.
Speaker 2: She lost her job.
Speaker 1: Not my daughter, but the roommate lost her job and
Speaker 1: is a very skilled computer person. That goes right into
Speaker 1: if you somehow are moving into the computer engineering in
Speaker 1: the world of AI.
Speaker 2: How hot a market is that?
Speaker 1: Is that the way you remember it used to be,
Speaker 1: where if you had any kind of computer skills, you
Speaker 1: could walk across the street for a ton more money
Speaker 1: and then walk back for even more money.
Speaker 2: Is that what we're seeing in the AI world?
Speaker 3: Certainly what you were seeing for a few months right,
Speaker 3: Like the tech world has gone through several hype cycles lately,
Speaker 3: they've been trying to figure out what the next big
Speaker 3: thing is going to be. Of course, if you remember
Speaker 3: a few years ago, everybody was talking about the metaverse,
Speaker 3: this sort of virtual world that we would all exist
Speaker 3: in something that Facebook and Instagram really put a lot
Speaker 3: of effort into, and the sort of long tail of
Speaker 3: that didn't really go anywhere. Crypto was sort of the
Speaker 3: next big hype cycle that people got excited about, and
Speaker 3: obviously that market crashed as well. Now everybody's talking about
Speaker 3: artificial intelligence. So it's not enough to just be a
Speaker 3: computer engineer. You kind of got to specialize in one thing,
Speaker 3: and you've got to make a bet that your specific
Speaker 3: specialization is going to be the thing that hits. Certainly,
Speaker 3: with these investments that we've been talking about from Apple
Speaker 3: and from open ai and from others, it certainly seems
Speaker 3: like a lot of the tech industry is sort of
Speaker 3: centering itself around this artificial intelligence revolution. But we've also
Speaker 3: seen some reasons to be skeptical about the long you know,
Speaker 3: the sort of ongoing success of this particular industry. The
Speaker 3: emergence of deep Seek, the Chinese artificial intelligence company that
Speaker 3: was able to develop this very competitive model for a
Speaker 3: fraction of the cost of what American models were able
Speaker 3: to offer, really did kind of raise some eyebrows in
Speaker 3: the investing class. I think a big indicator Bill is
Speaker 3: going to be tomorrow when Nvidia reports its earnings. They
Speaker 3: are the chip manufacturer that makes the technology that underpins
Speaker 3: a lot of these models used by open Ai and
Speaker 3: Google and others.
Speaker 2: Now, my daughter showed me, my tech daughter showed me.
Speaker 1: A picture of the first quantum chip that came out,
Speaker 1: and I didn't really understand that, And I want to
Speaker 1: know how much can this pop be cost?
Speaker 2: Do you have any information on that?
Speaker 3: Well, quantum computing has been around for a little while
Speaker 3: as this sort of idea that the you know, that
Speaker 3: our computers will somehow change and work differently on the
Speaker 3: back end. This is mostly an internal you know question, right,
Speaker 3: we're talking about chips and we're talking about processors. From
Speaker 3: a user perspective, you know, it's sort of questionable exactly
Speaker 3: what the change will be. But you're right to say that. Recently,
Speaker 3: Microsoft did show off what they call the first quantum
Speaker 3: computing chip. In terms of cost, I'm not sure off
Speaker 3: the top of my head, but you can imagine it's
Speaker 3: going to be quite pricey, given that this is just
Speaker 3: a prototype, sort of experimental technology at this point. But yeah,
Speaker 3: that's something to keep an eye on. In the background.
Speaker 3: This is something that we've been talking about for several
Speaker 3: years now. Not everyone has been able to get it
Speaker 3: to work just right, these sort of hyper efficient computers,
Speaker 3: but it is certainly something that Microsoft thinks that it's
Speaker 3: gotten a little bit closer to. I think what's going
Speaker 3: to be really interesting to watch is whether that actually
Speaker 3: shows up in the real world, how they implement this
Speaker 3: in a technology that you or I could use.
Speaker 1: Thank you, and I want to end with Alexa, what
Speaker 1: does the fire engine sound like?
Speaker 3: And good morning to everyone in the immediate Los Angeles area.
Speaker 2: Thanks Mike, always appreciated