No, Jeff Bezos didn't predict the way forward for the house PC would see it being swept away into the cloud
If there’s one factor that the tech business actually likes to do, it is speculate on the long run, particularly if somebody of word within the sector has made some newsworthy comment. Of late, there appears to be fairly a little bit of discuss the way forward for the house PC and that it’d find yourself going the way in which of the dodo, all due to one thing Jeff Bezos stated.
We’ve got to return in time to somewhat over a yr in the past, to when the founding father of Amazon was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin on the 2024 New York Occasions DealBook Summit. At one level, Bezos recollects a time when he was in Luxembourg, visiting a brewery.
“This journey was one of many little tiny catalysts for the founding of AWS (Amazon Internet Providers, based 2002), and the brewery was 300 years previous. This firm [had been] making beer for 300 years … they’d a museum, and in that museum was an electrical energy generator, 100 years previous.
“Once they needed to enhance the effectivity of their brewery with electrical energy, there was no energy grid, in order that they needed to construct their very own energy station … they made their very own electrical energy, and at the moment, that is what everyone did if a resort needed electrical energy: they’d their very own electrical generator.”
“I checked out this and I assumed that is what computation is like immediately. All people has their very own knowledge middle and that is not going to final. It is mindless. You are going to purchase compute off the grid. That is AWS: we have been doing it internally in Amazon for ourselves, and the APIs have been created.”
It is this explicit assertion that some fellow writers have used to create a segue of their very own: a dialogue about the way forward for the house PC. As an alternative of getting native computer systems doing all the things for work and gaming, we’ll as an alternative simply be utilizing a ‘dumb’ field that streams the outcomes from the cloud. In different phrases, it’s going to be like GeForce Now.
Whereas there’s nothing fallacious with these sorts of thought experiments in anyway, it is a bit of a stretch to mainly declare that that is what Bezos is predicting. He is not: he is speaking solely about corporations, analysis centres, universities, and so on all utilizing their very own native servers to do complicated compute workloads, being changed by a ‘energy grid’ of hyperscaled knowledge facilities.
You may assume that the large {hardware} and software program corporations of the world (AMD, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, et al) would completely like it if everybody simply did cloud computing, as a result of they make a lot cash within the knowledge middle sector. Nonetheless, that is solely been the case lately, and it is all due to the expansion of AI.
Within the case of Nvidia, it did not begin incomes extra from knowledge facilities than gaming till the beginning of 2023. It has been an explosive progress since then with the previous, however Group Inexperienced actually is not dreaming of getting everybody simply use GeForce Now on a tool that may do nothing greater than stream video, and for one easy cause: GFN’s revenues are a fraction of what Nvidia earns from promoting gaming GPUs.
Anyway, as I do not need to be any guiltier of doing what I’ve simply been criticising (i.e. extrapolating the long run primarily based on a modicum of knowledge), I am going to simply reiterate the necessary reality right here: Bezos wasn’t predicting the demise of the house PC in favour of cloud computing, simply localised knowledge facilities.
One thing that is already occurred, with Amazon, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, and different hyperscalers dominating the entire business, all whereas lots of of thousands and thousands of dwelling PCs are nonetheless being shipped each single yr. A nothing-burger that is been written as a something-burger continues to be truly a nothing-burger, however you knew that already.
Finest gaming rigs 2026