Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai are building data centres in space, Aravind Srinivas says they are under threat

At a time when the world’s biggest tech companies are racing to build larger and more powerful data centres, Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas has offered a sharply different view of where artificial intelligence is headed. While firms led by Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and others are investing billions into massive infrastructure projects and even exploring space-based data centres, Srinivas believes the real future of AI may quietly move away from these giant facilities. According to him, the next big change could put intelligence directly into users’ hands, rather than inside energy-hungry server farms.

Aravind Srinivas talks about the risks of having data centres

Speaking on a podcast with Prakhar Gupta on YouTube, Srinivas said the biggest risk facing data centres is the rise of powerful on-device AI. He argued that if advanced intelligence can be compressed into chips that run directly on phones, laptops or personal devices, the need for centralised cloud-based inference would sharply reduce. In simple terms, AI would no longer need to constantly talk to faraway servers to work.

Today’s popular AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity rely heavily on large data centres to process user requests. These facilities consume enormous amounts of electricity, require complex cooling systems and depend on steady water supplies to keep servers from overheating. Srinivas suggested that this model may not make sense in the long run if AI workloads can be handled locally…