New Delhi, March 31 -- Data centres are the new picks and shovels in the gold rush of the Generative AI age. US-based Meta recently announced plans to ramp up its AI infrastructure spending, allocating upwards of $40 billion to support its ambitions in artificial general intelligence. Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft are not far behind, pouring billions into building, upgrading and acquiring data centres packed with high-end GPUs and custom AI chips.

On the surface, this makes perfect sense: more models, data and computing power. But a growing chorus of researchers and technologists is beginning to ask a pointed question-what if we are preparing for a compute-heavy world that may never arrive?

Joe Tsai, chairman of Alibaba, raised this co...