Anyone remember the Holland Tulip Bubble? You may have been very young then – it occurred in February of 1637. It was a cold, dreary day, as I recall.
The term tulip mania is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values.
At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, certain tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan. The Semper Augustus was the most expensive tulip during the mania, at its height this tulip was even sold for ƒ10.000 (in guilders; equivalent to approx. €130.000 in 2024).
Semper Augustus (17th century) anonymous watercolour in the Tulip book of the Six Collection, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The Semper Augustus is famous for being the most expensive tulip sold during the tulip mania. The note states that the specimen was sold for ƒ3000 (~€38.000 in 2024).
Wagon of Fools by Hendrik Gerritsz Pot, 1637. Haarlem weavers chase a wind-borne wagon flying a fool’s cap flag. Flora, goddess of flowers, rides aboard to destruction in the sea with the vices Fraud, Gluttony and Avarice, Mrs. Mania, and Idle Hope/Fortuna.
Still Life with Flowers (1639), by Hans Bollongier (1623–1672), showcases the prized Semper Augustus tulip.
The original Semper Augustus tulip bulb is extinct and cannot be purchased. Famous as the most expensive tulip in history, its signature red-and-white flame pattern was caused by a mosaic virus. – Gemini
Modern tulip bulbs range from about $0.65 to $3.00 per bulb.
The Intrinsic Value of Tulips
They are a pretty cool flower. And surprisingly, in extremis, they can be eaten.
Elder G: During the famine known as the Dutch Hunger Winter (1944–1945), many Dutch people ate tulip bulbs because conventional food supplies had collapsed. The bulbs were often boiled, ground into flour, or used in soups and baked goods. Contemporary accounts describe them as bitter, starchy, and not especially pleasant.
However:
Some tulip varieties contain compounds that can cause digestive upset.
The outer skin and central sprout were often removed before cooking.
They were considered emergency food rather than desirable food.
Tulips and Data Centers: What Will These Data Centers Be Used For?
And the Data Center Wagon of Fools?
I don’t understand the projected demand for future data centers. As it stands now, so many web sites have useless chatbots. It seems like the future use will be for nefarious purposes – surveillance, military, invasions of privacy, manipulation of the population.
I question Elder G‘s objectivity, but s/he makes some interesting points:
The Skeptic’s Case
A skeptic might look around in 2026 and say:
Most chatbot interactions are trivial.
Many corporate AI deployments are glorified autocomplete.
Search results are often worse because of AI-generated clutter.
AI is generating enormous amounts of spam.
AI is creating fake images, fake videos, and fake social media accounts.
In that view, we’re building gigawatts of data centers to automate things nobody wanted automated.
The Dark Demand Scenario
There is another possibility that concerns many people.
AI demand could be driven by activities that are economically valuable but socially questionable:
Mass surveillance
Behavioral profiling
Political persuasion
Targeted advertising
Financial manipulation
Automated cyber warfare
Military intelligence systems
Autonomous weapons support systems
Historically, governments have often been major customers for advanced technologies.
The More Optimistic Case
The optimistic argument is not that chatbots will be useful. The optimistic argument is that AI eventually disappears into the background. Nobody today gets excited about:
Databases
OCR
GPS route optimization
Spam filtering
Yet these systems save millions of hours every day. If AI follows that path, much of its value won’t be visible.
For example:
Medical imaging systems catching cancers earlier.
Electrical grids balancing power demand.
Drug discovery accelerating.
Translation becoming nearly free.
Scientific research speeding up.
Those applications don’t generate viral headlines.
Nobody in 1990 predicted:
YouTube
Streaming video
Smartphones
Social media
Cloud computing
Pump & Dump?
One theory is that these investors are planning on a pump-and-dump – generating manic greed over the data center construction, then selling off before the lack of demand crashes the value of the data centers.
There’s actually some problems with this conspiracy theory: there will be tangible assets – servers with high end processors, the physical buildings, the electrical generation and cooling systems. There will also be infrastructure improvements to the electrical grid, data transmission, and roads.
Plus, for the pump-and-dump scheme to work, the assets have to be massively overstated. In the case of data centers, it’s fairly easy to inventory and estimate the assets. And some of the biggest, richest tech companies are involved – and in their wisdom they are making long-haul investments.
It turns out that WLBOTT jumped on the canal bandwagon in the early 19th century, not realizing that connecting our warehouse and retail store via canal was not a good idea.
It turns out that WLBOTT jumped on the canal bandwagon in the early 19th century, not realizing that connecting our warehouse and retail store via canal was not a good idea.
Pump and dump (P&D) is a form of securities fraud that involves artificially inflating the price of an owned stock through false and misleading positive statements (pump), in order to sell the cheaply purchased stock at a higher price (dump).
“Night wind hawkers” sold stock on the streets during the South Sea Bubble. (The Great Picture of Folly, 1720)
‘Ordinary people are coming together across partisan divides to say no to a status quo that allows tech lobbyists to ram through data center deals at a breathtaking clip.’ Photograph: Noah Berger/Reuters
The problem, though, is even though communities overwhelmingly support data center bans, the cases will simply bubble up in the courts and the big money interests will win.
Bonus! Tulip Recipies
From Atlas Obscura / Gastro Obscura
Gastro Obscura has a fascinating article (with a tulip bulb soup recipe) about the Nazi blockage of Holland, which led to a famine in the winter of 1944, known as the Hongerwinter, or “Hunger Winter,”
By 1944, when he was nine years old, there was only one thing left to eat: tulip bulb soup. […] “His father had been eating almost nothing but tulip bulbs,” says Muusers […]. Although parts of the tulip plant are safe to eat if correctly prepared, the germ at the core of the bulb can cause severe intestinal issues. Since his family had no previous experience cooking with them, they didn’t realize the germ needed to be removed. “It led to a tremendous blockage of his bowels, which caused him to have a huge, swollen belly.” After days of discomfort, his father found relief. “His father passed a wind that was the longest and loudest he had ever heard,” Muusers says. It’s one of the only memories of that dark time that still elicits a laugh.
