10 ms·

Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

282 points by nowflux 6mo ago

negura 6mo ago
as of november last year, data centre capex was only 60% of their revenues. which provides the bussiness justification to increase investment further
djoldman 6mo ago
Just for context, Amazon+Microsoft+Alphabet+Meta+Oracle total revenue for the 5 years ending in 2025 was... ~$6.5 trillion
metalman 6mo ago
we, the people, are the ultimate mega project, and it's showing
timmg 6mo ago
This tweet shows it as a percentage of US GDP: https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142 https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142 Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big **'n deal the railroads were!
- chromacity 6mo ago
  But doesn't that overstate it in the other direction? Talking about investments in proportion to GDP back when any estimate of GDP probably wasn't a good measure of total economic output? We're talking about the period before modern finance, before income taxes, back when most labor was agricultural... Did the average person shoulder the cost of railroads more than the average taxpayer today is shouldering the cost of F-35? (That's another line in Paul's post.)
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    That's the problem with going too far using "money" or "GDP" - you can roughly compare the WWII 45% of GDP spent with today - https://www.davemanuel.com/us-defense-spending-history-military-budget-data.php https://www.davemanuel.com/us-defense-spending-history-milit... because even by WWII much was "financialized" in such a way that it appears on GDP (though things like victory gardens, barter, etc would explicitly NOT be included without effort - maybe they do this?). As you get further and further into the past you have to start trying to measure it using human labor equivalents or similar. For example, what was the cost of a Great Pyramid? How does the cost change if you consider the theory that it was somewhat of a "make work" project to keep a mainly agricultural society employed during the "down months" and prevent starvation via centrally managed granaries?
    - helterskelter 6mo ago
      You don't even need to go that far back to run into issues, when I read Pride and Prejudice, I think Mr. Darcy was one of the richest people in England at around £10,000/year, but if you to calculate his wealth in today's terms it wasn't some outrageous sum (Wikipedia is telling me ~£800,000/year). The thing is that the economy was totally different back then -- labor cost practically nothing, but goods like furniture for instance were really expensive and would be handed down for generations. With £800K today, you may not even be able to afford the annual maintenance for his mansion and grounds. I knew somebody with a biggish yard in a small town and the garden was ~$40K/yr to maintain. Definitely not a Darcy estate either. Thinking about it, an income of £800K is something like the interest on £10m.
      - somenameforme 6mo ago
        The big change is the end of any sort of backing in money. The Minneapolis Fed calculated consumer price index levels since 1800 here. [1] Of course that comes with all the asterisks we're speaking of here for data going back that far, but their numbers are probably at least quite reasonable. They found that from 1800 to 1950 the CPI never shifted more than 25 points from the starting base of 51, so it always stayed within +/- ~50% of that baseline. That's through the Civil War, both World Wars, Spanish Flu, and much more. Then from 1971 (when the USD became completely unbacked) to present, it increased by more than 800 points, 1600% more than our baseline. And it's only increasing faster now. So the state of modern economics makes it completely incomparable to the past, because there's no precedent for what we're doing. But if you go back to just a bit before 1970, the economy would have of course grown much larger than it was in the past but still have been vaguely comparable to the past centuries. And I always find it paradoxical. In basic economic terms we should all have much more, but when you look at the things that people could afford on a basic salary, that does not seem to be the case. Somebody in the 50s going to college, picking up a used car, and then having enough money squirreled away to afford the downpayment on their first home -- all on the back of a part time job was a thing. It sounds like make-believe but it's real, and certainly a big part of the reason boomers were so out of touch with economic realities. Now a days a part time job wouldn't even be able to cover tuition, which makes one wonder how it could be that labor cost practically nothing in the past, as you said. Which I'm not disputing - just pointing out the paradox. https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/inflation-calculator/consumer-price-index-1800- https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl...
  - chaos_emergent 6mo ago
    I posted just that on the Twitter feed but then I realized that railroad started at the beginning of an industrial revolution where labor was a far larger portion of GDP compared to industrial production. So it kind of makes sense that the first enabling technology consumed far more GDP than current investments do, even on a marginal basis.
  - topspin 6mo ago
    The F-35 case is interesting. Lockheed Martin can, given peak rates seen in 2025, produce a new F-35 approximately every 36 hours, as they fill orders for US allies arming themselves with F-35's. US pilot training facilities are brimming with foreign pilots. It's the most successful export fighter since the F-16 and F-4, and presently the only means US allies have to obtain operational stealth combat technology. What that means for the US is this: if the US had to fight a conventional war with a near-peer military today, the US actually has the ability to replace stealth fighter losses. The program isn't some near-dormant, low-rate production deal that would take a year or more to ramp up: it's a operating line at full rate production that could conceivably build a US Navy squadron every ~15 days, plus a complete training and global logistics system, all on the front burner. If there is any truth to Gen Bradley's "Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics" line, the F-35 is a major win for the US.
    - palmotea 6mo ago
      > Lockheed Martin can, given peak rates seen in 2025, produce a new F-35 approximately every 36 hours ... it's a operating line at full rate production that could conceivably build a US Navy squadron every ~15 days, plus a complete logistics and training system, all on the front burner. That's amazing. I had no idea the US was still capable of things like that. I wonder if there's a way to get close to that, for things that aren't new and don't have a lot of active orders. Like have all the equipment setup but idle at some facility, keep an assembly teams ready and trained, then cycle through each weapon an activate a couple of these dormant manufacturing programs (at random!) every year, almost as a drill. So there's the capability to spin up, say F-22 production quickly when needed. Obviously it'd cost money. But it also costs a lot of money to have fighter jets when you're not actively fighting a way. Seems like manufacturing readiness would something an effective military would be smart to pay for.
      - topspin 6mo ago
        "I had no idea the US was still capable of things like that." It's more than just the US though. It's the demand from foreign customers that makes it possible. It's the careful balance between cost and capability that was achieved by the US and allies when it was designed. Without those things, the program would peter out after the US filled its own demand, and allies went looking for cheaper solutions. The F-35 isn't exactly cheap, but allies can see the capability justifies the cost. Now, there are so many of them in operation that, even after the bulk of orders are filled in the years to come, attrition and upgrades will keep the line operating and healthy at some level, which fulfills the goal you have in mind. Meanwhile, the F-35 equipped militaries of the Western world are trained to similar standards, operating similar and compatible equipment, and sharing the logistics burden. In actual conflict, those features are invaluable. There are few peacetime US developed weapons programs with such a record. It seems the interval between them is 20-30 years.
- j-bos 6mo ago
  As sibling comments mentioned deceptive comparison as well. How about comparing in percentage of Gross Energy Output. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800921003128 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...
- dghlsakjg 6mo ago
  The railroads and the interstate are arguably the biggest and broadest impact, especially in 2nd order effects (everything West of the Mississippi would be vastly different economically without them). I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it happen.
  - operatingthetan 6mo ago
    >I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it happen. Maybe? It seems as if the tech is starting to taper off already and AI companies are panicking and gaslighting us about what their newest models can actually do. If that's the case the industry is probably in trouble, or the world economy.
    - EFreethought 6mo ago
      > AI companies are panicking and gaslighting us about what their newest models can actually do I think they have been gaslighting us from the beginning.
    - bigfatkitten 6mo ago
      Bernie Madoff and his ilk made way for Sam Altman and his friends. Like Madoff, they’re desperate to pump their Ponzi scheme for as long as they can.
  - throwaway27448 6mo ago
    Is there really that much inefficiency in our distribution of goods and services such that AI could have this much impact?
    - fyrn_ 6mo ago
      I think the bet is more labor replacement, not saying that's particularly reasonable either
- tripletao 6mo ago
  This seems to show the railroads peaking around 9% of GDP. While that's lower than some of the other unsourced numbers I've seen, it's much higher than the numbers I was able to find support for myself at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44805979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44805979 The modern concept of GDP didn't exist back then, so all these numbers are calculated in retrospect with a lot of wiggle room. It feels like there's incentive now to report the highest possible number for the railroads, since that's the only thing that makes the datacenter investment look precedented by comparison.
- manquer 6mo ago
  GDP adjustments are warranted, but it is more stark than both the estimates suggest. The megaprojects of the previous generations all had decades long depreciation schedules. Many 50-100+ year old railways, bridges, tunnels or dams and other utilities are still in active use with only minimal maintenance Amortized Y-o-Y the current spends would dwarf everything at the reported depreciation schedule of 6(!) years for the GPUs - the largest line item.
  - wr2 6mo ago
    Also railways would always have alternative uses at that time - e.g. logistics in warfare. What other uses do GPU's have that are critical...? lol In addition to your points, this is why I always laugh when people do backward comparisons. What characteristics do they share in common? Very little.
    - jamesknelson 6mo ago
      GPUs do have a use in warfare though. I mean, LLMs are basically offensive weapons disguised as software engineers. Sure, LLMs can kind of put together a prototype of some CRUD app, so long as it doesn’t need to be maintainable, understandable, innovative or secure. But they excel at persisting until some arbitrary well defined condition is met, and it appears to be the case that “you gain entry to system X” works well as one of those conditions. Given the amount of industrial infrastructure connected to the internet, and the ways in which it can break, LLMs are at some point going to be used as weapons. And it seems likely that they’ll be rather effective. FWIW, people first saw TNT as a way to dye things yellow, and then as a mining tool. So LLMs starting out as chatbots and then being seen as (bad) software engineers does put them in good company.
      - bigfatkitten 6mo ago
        > GPUs do have a use in warfare though. Unclassified public cloud GPUs are completely useless when your warfighting workloads are at the SECRET level or above.
- SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago
  > Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big *'n deal the railroads were! It also makes it more dramatic, consider the programs on the list and what they have in common. * The Apollo program. A government-funded science project. No return on investment required. * The Manhattan Project. A government-funded military project. No return on investment required. * The F-35 program. A government funded military project. No return on investment required. * The ISS. A government funded science project. No return on investment required. * The Interstate Highway System. A government funded infrastructure project. No return on investment required. * The Marshall Plan. A government funded foreign policy project. No return on investment required. The actual return on investment for these projects is in the very long term of decades; Economic development, national security, scientific progress that benefits the entire country if not the entire world. Consider the Marshall Plan in particular. It's a massive money sink, but it's nature as a government project meant it could run at losses without significant economic risk and could aim for extremely long term benefits. It's been paying dividends until January last year; 77 years. And that dividend wasn't always obvious; Goodwill from Europe towards the US is what has prevented Europe from taking similar actions as China around the US' Big Tech companies. Many of whom relied extensively on 'Dumping' to push European competitors out of business, a more hostile Europe would've taken much more protectionist measures and ended up much like China, with it's own crop of tech giants. And then there's the two programs left out. The railroads and AI datacenters. Private enterprise that simply does not have the luxury of sitting on it's ass waiting for benefits to materialize 50 years later. As many other comments in this thread have already pointed out: When the US & European railroad bubbles failed, massive economic trouble followed. OpenAI's need for (partial) return on investment is as short as this year or their IPO risks failure. And if they don't, similar massive economic trouble is assured.
  - yabutlivnWoods 6mo ago
    You're actually arguing those highly technical engineering projects provided nothing to humanity investing labor in them because they were not a financial success? Just confirms my suspicion HN is not a forum for intellectual curiosity. It's been entirely subsumed by MBAs and wannabe billionaires.
- hyperbovine 6mo ago
  The railroad buildout was a lot more, idk, tangible. Most of that money was spent employing millions of people to smelt iron, lay track, build bridges, blow up mountains, etc. It’s a lot more exciting than a few freight loads of overpriced GPUs.
  - wr2 6mo ago
    Also a good point - railroads for sure brought a lot more optimism. LLMs+Data centres on the other hand...
- chatmasta 6mo ago
  I’m surprised there is no broadband rollout or telecom network on there. I guess it’s hard to quantify the cost within a specific event?
  - mongol 6mo ago
    Indeed. Or for that matter, electrification?
- maxglute 6mo ago
  Depreciation schedule: Tulips: weeks GPUs: 6 years Fiber: 20-50 years Rail, roads, bridges: 50-100+ years Hyperscalers closer to tulips than other hard infra.
  - casey2 6mo ago
    What rail, road or bridge in the US lasts 50 years? The maintenance of rail over 6 years costs more than replacing all the GPUs in a data center, even at their current markup.
    - bdangubic 6mo ago
      have you seen our rails, roads and bridges?!? 50 year old ones in many places are being referred to as “new ones” :) the only reason any “maintenance” on them is expensive is corruption which at municipal level rivals current administration in some places
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - maxglute 6mo ago
      Look up deterioration curve and maintenance curve (J shaped) for hard infra. TLDR is asset stays in good condition for 75% of lifetime i.e. decades with light maintenance (flat part of J). By roads I mean highways where most of the expense / work is in building out the base / sub base (i.e. ballasts for rail), that last decades. US is uniquely bad maintained/prevention but even then major assets do not deteriorate on GPU timeline.
- LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
  It seems a little silly to put 71 years of private-and-public-sector infrastructure development alongside something highly targeted like the Manhattan Project. It might make more sense to compare the Manhattan Project to the first transcontinental railroad, as a similar targeted but enormously ambitious project amounting to a major technical milestone. Likewise I don't think it makes sense to compare post-ChatGPT hyperscaler data center construction with all 19th-century US railroad construction. Why not include the already considerable infrastructure of pre-AI AWS/Azure? The relevant economic change isn't "AI," it's having oodles of fast compute available online and a market demanding more of it. OTOH comparing these data centers to the Manhattan Project is wrong in the opposite direction: we should really be comparing a specific headline-grabber like Stargate. This categorization is just a confusing mishmash. The real conclusion to draw here is that we tend to spend more on long-term and broadly-defined things than we do on specific projects with specific deadlines. Indeed.
- globular-toast 6mo ago
  Were? How else do you expect to get goods around by land?
- cousin_it 6mo ago
  Wild graphic. US spending on one flying killing machine (the F-35) is comparable to total spending on the Marshall plan to reconstruct Europe after WWII, or the interstate highway system, or all datacenters combined. Priorities!
  - marche101 6mo ago
    I don't think that's right - the scale is logarithmic. The Marshall Plan is 20 times as expensive
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - 93po 6mo ago
      And this is why I hate log scale graphs. Even in the cases where it does have a useful effect, 90%+ of people are still going to interpret it in a linear way and therefore make it massively misleading.
  - brookst 6mo ago
    It’s hazardous to blend fixed and variable costs.
- comfysocks 6mo ago
  Railroad looks huge on the GDP (estimate) chart because the US transcontinental railroad was built in the mid 1800’s when the US economy was relatively tiny.
therein 6mo ago
I really dislike the term hyperscaler. Comes off very insincere. They came up with it themselves, didn't they? What's the official definition supposed to be now? Companies that are setting up as many GPU/TPU server clusters as possible for a demand that's yet to exist?
- cidd 6mo ago
  Nobody really uses the term in the Valley except probably C-level people talking to Wall street investors.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  It always makes me think of a hyperactive toddler running around in circles, which oddly fits most thought leaders who use the term.
  - lenerdenator 6mo ago
    That's not fair to the toddlers; their crap tends to be safely contained in a diaper as opposed to their heads.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- coffeefirst 6mo ago
  I have concluded the entire public discourse surrounding AI has no relationship to real stuff that you can go, test, and point at. There’s a loop of everyone is saying stuff because everyone else is saying stuff that turns into a sort of reality inspired fan fiction. It’s not just that it’s wrong or imprecise, that I expect, it’s that the folklore takes on a life of its own.
- mikrl 6mo ago
  Superscaler sounds too much like superscalar…
- rcxdude 6mo ago
  Hyperscale exists as a term pre-LLM-hype. It mainly exists to describe the kind of datacenteres that companies like google and amazon have been building for at least a decade now: very large, very highly integrated and customised hardware, with a focus on cloud deployment and management strategies. This is to distinguish from just a large datacenter built with commodity server parts from a set of vendors (i.e. the kinds of servers 99% of people will be able to lay their hands on. Another way to put it is that if you're not writing your own BIOS/BMC/etc, you're probably not hyperscaling).
lukeschlather 6mo ago
This seems like a total category error. The Railroads are the only example that actually seems comparable, in being an infrastructure build out that's mostly done by a variety of private companies. Examples of things that would be worth comparing to the datacenter boom are factory construction and utilities (electrification in the first half of the 20th century, running water, gas pipes.)
- stefan_ 6mo ago
  "Infrastructure build out"? Everything put into these datacenters is worthless well before 10 years have gone by. We aren't even getting infrastructure out of it, they are just powering it with gas turbines..
  - jeffbee 6mo ago
    This isn't true and you can easily prove it to yourself by renting a Sandy Bridge CPU or a TPUv2 from Google today.
- jeffbee 6mo ago
  The other categorical error is that the American people paid the railroads a monumental subsidy to get the job done. We gave them almost 10% of the territory.
  - lenerdenator 6mo ago
    Given the size of some of these data centers, the incentives packages that local governments often give their developers, and the impact on the electric grid that can, in some cases, raise costs for other ratepayers, I'd say the comparison could be similar. The one Google's putting in KC North is 500 acres [0] and there were $10 billion in taxable revenue bonds put up by the Port Authority to help with the cost. This for a company that could pay for that in cash right now. [0] https://fox4kc.com/news/google-confirms-its-behind-new-data-center-coming-to-northland/ https://fox4kc.com/news/google-confirms-its-behind-new-data-...
kerblang 6mo ago
Adjusted for inflation? edit - sorry, it is in fact adjusted, text is kinda hard to see
- anigbrowl 6mo ago
  It literally says 'Inflation-adjusted costs' on the right side of the graph, right under the main title, FFS.
  - kerblang 6mo ago
    There's no need to be snide
SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
Gentle reminder that the cost of producing well-formatted graphs is much, much lower than it used to be. We grew up in a world where the mere existence of this graph would prove that someone put a great deal of effort into making it, and now it does not. I have no specific reason to doubt the information, but if you want to have reliable epistemic practices, you can no longer treat random graphs you find on social media as presumptively true.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
pier25 6mo ago
https://xcancel.com/finmoorhouse/status/2044933442236776794 https://xcancel.com/finmoorhouse/status/2044933442236776794
losvedir 6mo ago
Does anyone know what's included in "datacenter capex"? In particular, does that include spending for associated power generation? Because whether or not the AI craze pans out, if we've built a whole bunch of power plants (and especially solar, wind, hydro, etc) that would be a big win.
- measurablefunc 6mo ago
  You can't run a data center on solar or wind (even w/ batteries included). Everything they're building runs on gas & coal like what Musk got running for xAI.
  - RealityVoid 6mo ago
    You can and _must_ if you want competitive costs. Musk famously overpaid in order to get speed of deployment. I was reading geohot's musings about building a data center and doing so cost effectively and solar is _the_ way to get low energy costs. The problem is off-peak energy, but even with that... you might come off ahead. And that dude is anything but a green fanatic. But he's a pragmatist.
  - rangestransform 6mo ago
    That’s because Rs let NIMBYs and the fossil fuel lobby call the shots, and Ds let NIMBYs and degrowthers call the shots. I bet China isn’t powering their datacenters with gas turbines
    - therobots927 6mo ago
      They aren’t building out datacenters the way the US is. The arms race is a myth.
operatingthetan 6mo ago
Is this an appropriate spend and risk? I'm starting to feel as if we have been collectively glamoured by AI and are not making sound decisions on this.
- theonemind 6mo ago
  It doesn't seem like it to me. I like watching Ed Zitron rant about it on YouTube. It's fun.
  - therobots927 6mo ago
    Same. He’s very knowledgeable about this and very skeptical. Not to mention hilarious. I’m getting my popcorn ready for the bubble pop.
- staplor 6mo ago
  I’ve had similar thoughts, but I’ve come around to this buildout being rational. All of the big ai labs are still jockeying for compute and are having trouble keeping up with inference demand.
mattas 6mo ago
Is this _actual_ spend? Like dollars actually changing hands? Or is this "we said we are going to invest $X"? What about the circular agreements?
- therobots927 6mo ago
  A lot of this is committed capital and the datacenters haven’t even broken ground.
cactacea 6mo ago
Really shows where our priorities are at as a country. SMH
throwaway27448 6mo ago
Further evidence that the US, for whatever reason, lacks basic ability to rationally use resources.
- guywithahat 6mo ago
  If you adjust for GDP railroads were much more expensive, and I don't think they're viewed as a mistake https://x.com/finmoorhouse/status/2044985790212583699?s=20 https://x.com/finmoorhouse/status/2044985790212583699?s=20
  - ElevenLathe 6mo ago
    It's not totally clear that the gigantic push to run rail lines through undeveloped parts of North America "ahead of demand" for reasons of genocide (aka "white settlement"), especially the transcontinental routes, was the smartest investment, even leaving aside the horrific crime it represents. We probably would have gotten greater ROI connecting more developed places on a piecemeal basis and extending the rail network more slowly in the West (and probably even more rapidly in the developed East) instead of founding new towns along brand-new rail lines. There is a reason the federal government was so involved in the finance of these things: left alone, private Eastern capital would not have done things the way they were done, which was chiefly to "open the frontier" aka accelerate the genocide. I certainly think it was a mistake.
- emp17344 6mo ago
  It’s just a classic bubble. They’ve happened before, and while they are irrational, the market sorts itself eventually.
- tim333 6mo ago
  The US has mostly ended up quite prosperous if not that environmentally friendly.
  - throwaway27448 6mo ago
    In some measurements, sure. But we're god awful at rationally using our wealth
bawana 6mo ago
only 20% of health care spending!
- vrganj 6mo ago
  And 0% of people cured.
  - dilberx 6mo ago
    everything is business, less about humanity
amelius 6mo ago
We could have had a space elevator by now.
- pstuart 6mo ago
  We could have had non-carbon energy independence by now.
  - therobots927 6mo ago
    But the AI fanatics claimed that AI would solve cold fusion, making that whole thing moot. The only problem is, if AI doesn’t solve cold fusion, we’re back to square one. And a few trillion dollars in the hole.
    - boxedemp 6mo ago
      If we're counting, the USA was already pretty deep in the hole. Anybody that has experienced crippling debt understands there's a point of no return where you just embrace it. And that point is right before rock bottom.
      - tim333 6mo ago
        Government debt is different - mostly gets inflated away.
    - danilocesar 6mo ago
      There’s a joke that in a couple of years, after spending trillions of dollars, burning mountains of coal to run country-sized datacenters and boiling all the oceans, we finally achieve AGI. Then the first question we ask it is: 'How do we fix climate change?' And it answers: 'you can start by unplugging me'
  - big-and-small 6mo ago
    China is working on this.
jgalt212 6mo ago
Just wait until the DAOs become agentic!
hargup 6mo ago
Justin Lebar (he built xla compiler and worked at OpenAI) has an amazing talk about this subject https://youtu.be/cyJU32ivIlk?si=gYuHtzMJIvaSqcht https://youtu.be/cyJU32ivIlk?si=gYuHtzMJIvaSqcht
uejfiweun 6mo ago
Does anyone have any plans for what to do with all these chips and things once they are obsolete? I can't imagine they are all just going to go to some scrap heap.
- moogly 6mo ago
  I have bad news for you...
thelastgallon 6mo ago
I wonder what percentage of GDP is spent on crypto.
- tim333 6mo ago
  Crypto's a funny one economically as while there are some real costs like mining, a lot of the money is just swapped around like A makes a coin, B pays A a million for some but the million isn't really spent, just swapped between crypto idiots.
philip1209 6mo ago
Would love to see Apple’s china investment on this chart.
abofh 6mo ago
Not if you include tax breaks as mega projects
dlenski 6mo ago
There's a pretty big missing case in this comparison: nuclear weapons. The US spent ~$12 trillion in ~2024 dollars on nuclear weapons between 1940 and 1996, and the vast majority of that spending was in the 1950s and early 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_States#:~:text=Between%201940%20and%201996%2C%20the%20US%20spent%20over%20US%2411.9%C2%A0trillion%20in%20present%2Dday%20terms%5B15%5D%20on%20nuclear%20weapons%20infrastructure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...
- casefields 6mo ago
  This is called paltering, which is lying telling by telling the truth. The delivery systems are included when coming up with that number. So all those submarines, bombers, and ICBMs are also counted. All 3 systems of course are still valuable and useful without nuclear weapons.
  - dlenski 6mo ago
    What a strange and uncharitable response. 1. ICBMs. I question your claim that these are "of course" valuable without nuclear payloads. No ICBM has even been used in war (there's a questionable case of Russia using an experimental missile in 2024 in Ukraine). Certainly, without nuclear payloads, they would be a lot less valuable. 2. Submarines, bombers. Yes, these general categories of vehicles have military value beyond delivering nuclear weapons. The specific ones that are most likely to be used for delivering nuclear weapons were developed and built for this specific purpose, often at extremely high cost (with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_B-2_Spirit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_B-2_Spirit as a specific example). These delivery systems for nuclear weapons wouldn't have been built in such great numbers and at such great cost if not for their intended purpose of delivering nuclear weapons.
spprashant 6mo ago
I think all misgivings about AI would go away fast, if it solved one important problem for humanity. Carbon nanotubes for space elevators, sustainable nuclear fusion, or something in that ilk.
- therobots927 6mo ago
  Well it can build a killer front end and that’s great at impressing investors.
- sixhobbits 6mo ago
  Personalized medical treatment looks like the most promising candidate so far, would that do it for you?
  - therobots927 6mo ago
    What exactly does “personalized medical treatment” entail? Writing prescriptions? Ok, I can see how AI could theoretically do that (assuming it doesn’t hallucinate and kill a bunch of people). Oh and don’t think it’ll be so easy to give AI the legal authority to prescribe controlled substances. And insurance companies may take issue with expensive prescriptions written by a chat bot. Perform surgeries? Stitch wounds? That’s decades away. And that also opens a legal can of worms. Maybe the AI lawyers can figure something out.
    - jnpnj 6mo ago
      maybe he's referring to people doing research on their own variant of disease through LLMs to find cures
      - therobots927 6mo ago
        That’s fine and dandy but it won’t do anything for most people with serious health problems.
        6mo ago
arisAlexis 6mo ago
Because this is the last invention of man and they realize this
- silexia 6mo ago
  This is the sentiment most AI experts have, and nearly half of them believe it will lead to our extinction.
hashmap 6mo ago
if you think datacenters are a waste (they are), wait til you hear about department of war spending
danielmarkbruce 6mo ago
It's not a project. It's just a lot of money being spent on compute across hundreds/thousands of similar projects. An analogy would be "all the money spent on transportation infra" over some period of time.

282 points by nowflux 6mo ago

as of november last year, data centre capex was only 60% of their revenues. which provides the bussiness justification to increase investment further

djoldman 6mo ago

Just for context, Amazon+Microsoft+Alphabet+Meta+Oracle total revenue for the 5 years ending in 2025 was... ~$6.5 trillion

metalman 6mo ago

we, the people, are the ultimate mega project, and it's showing

timmg 6mo ago

This tweet shows it as a percentage of US GDP: https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142 https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142 Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big **'n deal the railroads were!

chromacity 6mo ago
But doesn't that overstate it in the other direction? Talking about investments in proportion to GDP back when any estimate of GDP probably wasn't a good measure of total economic output? We're talking about the period before modern finance, before income taxes, back when most labor was agricultural... Did the average person shoulder the cost of railroads more than the average taxpayer today is shouldering the cost of F-35? (That's another line in Paul's post.)
- bombcar 6mo ago
  That's the problem with going too far using "money" or "GDP" - you can roughly compare the WWII 45% of GDP spent with today - https://www.davemanuel.com/us-defense-spending-history-military-budget-data.php https://www.davemanuel.com/us-defense-spending-history-milit... because even by WWII much was "financialized" in such a way that it appears on GDP (though things like victory gardens, barter, etc would explicitly NOT be included without effort - maybe they do this?). As you get further and further into the past you have to start trying to measure it using human labor equivalents or similar. For example, what was the cost of a Great Pyramid? How does the cost change if you consider the theory that it was somewhat of a "make work" project to keep a mainly agricultural society employed during the "down months" and prevent starvation via centrally managed granaries?
  - helterskelter 6mo ago
    You don't even need to go that far back to run into issues, when I read Pride and Prejudice, I think Mr. Darcy was one of the richest people in England at around £10,000/year, but if you to calculate his wealth in today's terms it wasn't some outrageous sum (Wikipedia is telling me ~£800,000/year). The thing is that the economy was totally different back then -- labor cost practically nothing, but goods like furniture for instance were really expensive and would be handed down for generations. With £800K today, you may not even be able to afford the annual maintenance for his mansion and grounds. I knew somebody with a biggish yard in a small town and the garden was ~$40K/yr to maintain. Definitely not a Darcy estate either. Thinking about it, an income of £800K is something like the interest on £10m.
    - somenameforme 6mo ago
      The big change is the end of any sort of backing in money. The Minneapolis Fed calculated consumer price index levels since 1800 here. [1] Of course that comes with all the asterisks we're speaking of here for data going back that far, but their numbers are probably at least quite reasonable. They found that from 1800 to 1950 the CPI never shifted more than 25 points from the starting base of 51, so it always stayed within +/- ~50% of that baseline. That's through the Civil War, both World Wars, Spanish Flu, and much more. Then from 1971 (when the USD became completely unbacked) to present, it increased by more than 800 points, 1600% more than our baseline. And it's only increasing faster now. So the state of modern economics makes it completely incomparable to the past, because there's no precedent for what we're doing. But if you go back to just a bit before 1970, the economy would have of course grown much larger than it was in the past but still have been vaguely comparable to the past centuries. And I always find it paradoxical. In basic economic terms we should all have much more, but when you look at the things that people could afford on a basic salary, that does not seem to be the case. Somebody in the 50s going to college, picking up a used car, and then having enough money squirreled away to afford the downpayment on their first home -- all on the back of a part time job was a thing. It sounds like make-believe but it's real, and certainly a big part of the reason boomers were so out of touch with economic realities. Now a days a part time job wouldn't even be able to cover tuition, which makes one wonder how it could be that labor cost practically nothing in the past, as you said. Which I'm not disputing - just pointing out the paradox. https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/inflation-calculator/consumer-price-index-1800- https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl...
- chaos_emergent 6mo ago
  I posted just that on the Twitter feed but then I realized that railroad started at the beginning of an industrial revolution where labor was a far larger portion of GDP compared to industrial production. So it kind of makes sense that the first enabling technology consumed far more GDP than current investments do, even on a marginal basis.
- topspin 6mo ago
  The F-35 case is interesting. Lockheed Martin can, given peak rates seen in 2025, produce a new F-35 approximately every 36 hours, as they fill orders for US allies arming themselves with F-35's. US pilot training facilities are brimming with foreign pilots. It's the most successful export fighter since the F-16 and F-4, and presently the only means US allies have to obtain operational stealth combat technology. What that means for the US is this: if the US had to fight a conventional war with a near-peer military today, the US actually has the ability to replace stealth fighter losses. The program isn't some near-dormant, low-rate production deal that would take a year or more to ramp up: it's a operating line at full rate production that could conceivably build a US Navy squadron every ~15 days, plus a complete training and global logistics system, all on the front burner. If there is any truth to Gen Bradley's "Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics" line, the F-35 is a major win for the US.
  - palmotea 6mo ago
    > Lockheed Martin can, given peak rates seen in 2025, produce a new F-35 approximately every 36 hours ... it's a operating line at full rate production that could conceivably build a US Navy squadron every ~15 days, plus a complete logistics and training system, all on the front burner. That's amazing. I had no idea the US was still capable of things like that. I wonder if there's a way to get close to that, for things that aren't new and don't have a lot of active orders. Like have all the equipment setup but idle at some facility, keep an assembly teams ready and trained, then cycle through each weapon an activate a couple of these dormant manufacturing programs (at random!) every year, almost as a drill. So there's the capability to spin up, say F-22 production quickly when needed. Obviously it'd cost money. But it also costs a lot of money to have fighter jets when you're not actively fighting a way. Seems like manufacturing readiness would something an effective military would be smart to pay for.
    - topspin 6mo ago
      "I had no idea the US was still capable of things like that." It's more than just the US though. It's the demand from foreign customers that makes it possible. It's the careful balance between cost and capability that was achieved by the US and allies when it was designed. Without those things, the program would peter out after the US filled its own demand, and allies went looking for cheaper solutions. The F-35 isn't exactly cheap, but allies can see the capability justifies the cost. Now, there are so many of them in operation that, even after the bulk of orders are filled in the years to come, attrition and upgrades will keep the line operating and healthy at some level, which fulfills the goal you have in mind. Meanwhile, the F-35 equipped militaries of the Western world are trained to similar standards, operating similar and compatible equipment, and sharing the logistics burden. In actual conflict, those features are invaluable. There are few peacetime US developed weapons programs with such a record. It seems the interval between them is 20-30 years.
j-bos 6mo ago
As sibling comments mentioned deceptive comparison as well. How about comparing in percentage of Gross Energy Output. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800921003128 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...
dghlsakjg 6mo ago
The railroads and the interstate are arguably the biggest and broadest impact, especially in 2nd order effects (everything West of the Mississippi would be vastly different economically without them). I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it happen.
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  >I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it happen. Maybe? It seems as if the tech is starting to taper off already and AI companies are panicking and gaslighting us about what their newest models can actually do. If that's the case the industry is probably in trouble, or the world economy.
  - EFreethought 6mo ago
    > AI companies are panicking and gaslighting us about what their newest models can actually do I think they have been gaslighting us from the beginning.
  - bigfatkitten 6mo ago
    Bernie Madoff and his ilk made way for Sam Altman and his friends. Like Madoff, they’re desperate to pump their Ponzi scheme for as long as they can.
- throwaway27448 6mo ago
  Is there really that much inefficiency in our distribution of goods and services such that AI could have this much impact?
  - fyrn_ 6mo ago
    I think the bet is more labor replacement, not saying that's particularly reasonable either
tripletao 6mo ago
This seems to show the railroads peaking around 9% of GDP. While that's lower than some of the other unsourced numbers I've seen, it's much higher than the numbers I was able to find support for myself at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44805979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44805979 The modern concept of GDP didn't exist back then, so all these numbers are calculated in retrospect with a lot of wiggle room. It feels like there's incentive now to report the highest possible number for the railroads, since that's the only thing that makes the datacenter investment look precedented by comparison.
manquer 6mo ago
GDP adjustments are warranted, but it is more stark than both the estimates suggest. The megaprojects of the previous generations all had decades long depreciation schedules. Many 50-100+ year old railways, bridges, tunnels or dams and other utilities are still in active use with only minimal maintenance Amortized Y-o-Y the current spends would dwarf everything at the reported depreciation schedule of 6(!) years for the GPUs - the largest line item.
- wr2 6mo ago
  Also railways would always have alternative uses at that time - e.g. logistics in warfare. What other uses do GPU's have that are critical...? lol In addition to your points, this is why I always laugh when people do backward comparisons. What characteristics do they share in common? Very little.
  - jamesknelson 6mo ago
    GPUs do have a use in warfare though. I mean, LLMs are basically offensive weapons disguised as software engineers. Sure, LLMs can kind of put together a prototype of some CRUD app, so long as it doesn’t need to be maintainable, understandable, innovative or secure. But they excel at persisting until some arbitrary well defined condition is met, and it appears to be the case that “you gain entry to system X” works well as one of those conditions. Given the amount of industrial infrastructure connected to the internet, and the ways in which it can break, LLMs are at some point going to be used as weapons. And it seems likely that they’ll be rather effective. FWIW, people first saw TNT as a way to dye things yellow, and then as a mining tool. So LLMs starting out as chatbots and then being seen as (bad) software engineers does put them in good company.
    - bigfatkitten 6mo ago
      > GPUs do have a use in warfare though. Unclassified public cloud GPUs are completely useless when your warfighting workloads are at the SECRET level or above.
SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago
> Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big *'n deal the railroads were! It also makes it more dramatic, consider the programs on the list and what they have in common. * The Apollo program. A government-funded science project. No return on investment required. * The Manhattan Project. A government-funded military project. No return on investment required. * The F-35 program. A government funded military project. No return on investment required. * The ISS. A government funded science project. No return on investment required. * The Interstate Highway System. A government funded infrastructure project. No return on investment required. * The Marshall Plan. A government funded foreign policy project. No return on investment required. The actual return on investment for these projects is in the very long term of decades; Economic development, national security, scientific progress that benefits the entire country if not the entire world. Consider the Marshall Plan in particular. It's a massive money sink, but it's nature as a government project meant it could run at losses without significant economic risk and could aim for extremely long term benefits. It's been paying dividends until January last year; 77 years. And that dividend wasn't always obvious; Goodwill from Europe towards the US is what has prevented Europe from taking similar actions as China around the US' Big Tech companies. Many of whom relied extensively on 'Dumping' to push European competitors out of business, a more hostile Europe would've taken much more protectionist measures and ended up much like China, with it's own crop of tech giants. And then there's the two programs left out. The railroads and AI datacenters. Private enterprise that simply does not have the luxury of sitting on it's ass waiting for benefits to materialize 50 years later. As many other comments in this thread have already pointed out: When the US & European railroad bubbles failed, massive economic trouble followed. OpenAI's need for (partial) return on investment is as short as this year or their IPO risks failure. And if they don't, similar massive economic trouble is assured.
- yabutlivnWoods 6mo ago
  You're actually arguing those highly technical engineering projects provided nothing to humanity investing labor in them because they were not a financial success? Just confirms my suspicion HN is not a forum for intellectual curiosity. It's been entirely subsumed by MBAs and wannabe billionaires.
hyperbovine 6mo ago
The railroad buildout was a lot more, idk, tangible. Most of that money was spent employing millions of people to smelt iron, lay track, build bridges, blow up mountains, etc. It’s a lot more exciting than a few freight loads of overpriced GPUs.
- wr2 6mo ago
  Also a good point - railroads for sure brought a lot more optimism. LLMs+Data centres on the other hand...
chatmasta 6mo ago
I’m surprised there is no broadband rollout or telecom network on there. I guess it’s hard to quantify the cost within a specific event?
- mongol 6mo ago
  Indeed. Or for that matter, electrification?
maxglute 6mo ago
Depreciation schedule: Tulips: weeks GPUs: 6 years Fiber: 20-50 years Rail, roads, bridges: 50-100+ years Hyperscalers closer to tulips than other hard infra.
- casey2 6mo ago
  What rail, road or bridge in the US lasts 50 years? The maintenance of rail over 6 years costs more than replacing all the GPUs in a data center, even at their current markup.
  - bdangubic 6mo ago
    have you seen our rails, roads and bridges?!? 50 year old ones in many places are being referred to as “new ones” :) the only reason any “maintenance” on them is expensive is corruption which at municipal level rivals current administration in some places
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - maxglute 6mo ago
    Look up deterioration curve and maintenance curve (J shaped) for hard infra. TLDR is asset stays in good condition for 75% of lifetime i.e. decades with light maintenance (flat part of J). By roads I mean highways where most of the expense / work is in building out the base / sub base (i.e. ballasts for rail), that last decades. US is uniquely bad maintained/prevention but even then major assets do not deteriorate on GPU timeline.
LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
It seems a little silly to put 71 years of private-and-public-sector infrastructure development alongside something highly targeted like the Manhattan Project. It might make more sense to compare the Manhattan Project to the first transcontinental railroad, as a similar targeted but enormously ambitious project amounting to a major technical milestone. Likewise I don't think it makes sense to compare post-ChatGPT hyperscaler data center construction with all 19th-century US railroad construction. Why not include the already considerable infrastructure of pre-AI AWS/Azure? The relevant economic change isn't "AI," it's having oodles of fast compute available online and a market demanding more of it. OTOH comparing these data centers to the Manhattan Project is wrong in the opposite direction: we should really be comparing a specific headline-grabber like Stargate. This categorization is just a confusing mishmash. The real conclusion to draw here is that we tend to spend more on long-term and broadly-defined things than we do on specific projects with specific deadlines. Indeed.
globular-toast 6mo ago
Were? How else do you expect to get goods around by land?
cousin_it 6mo ago
Wild graphic. US spending on one flying killing machine (the F-35) is comparable to total spending on the Marshall plan to reconstruct Europe after WWII, or the interstate highway system, or all datacenters combined. Priorities!
- marche101 6mo ago
  I don't think that's right - the scale is logarithmic. The Marshall Plan is 20 times as expensive
  - deleted 6mo ago
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  - 93po 6mo ago
    And this is why I hate log scale graphs. Even in the cases where it does have a useful effect, 90%+ of people are still going to interpret it in a linear way and therefore make it massively misleading.
- brookst 6mo ago
  It’s hazardous to blend fixed and variable costs.
comfysocks 6mo ago
Railroad looks huge on the GDP (estimate) chart because the US transcontinental railroad was built in the mid 1800’s when the US economy was relatively tiny.

therein 6mo ago

I really dislike the term hyperscaler. Comes off very insincere. They came up with it themselves, didn't they? What's the official definition supposed to be now? Companies that are setting up as many GPU/TPU server clusters as possible for a demand that's yet to exist?

cidd 6mo ago
Nobody really uses the term in the Valley except probably C-level people talking to Wall street investors.
bombcar 6mo ago
It always makes me think of a hyperactive toddler running around in circles, which oddly fits most thought leaders who use the term.
- lenerdenator 6mo ago
  That's not fair to the toddlers; their crap tends to be safely contained in a diaper as opposed to their heads.
deleted 6mo ago
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coffeefirst 6mo ago
I have concluded the entire public discourse surrounding AI has no relationship to real stuff that you can go, test, and point at. There’s a loop of everyone is saying stuff because everyone else is saying stuff that turns into a sort of reality inspired fan fiction. It’s not just that it’s wrong or imprecise, that I expect, it’s that the folklore takes on a life of its own.
mikrl 6mo ago
Superscaler sounds too much like superscalar…
rcxdude 6mo ago
Hyperscale exists as a term pre-LLM-hype. It mainly exists to describe the kind of datacenteres that companies like google and amazon have been building for at least a decade now: very large, very highly integrated and customised hardware, with a focus on cloud deployment and management strategies. This is to distinguish from just a large datacenter built with commodity server parts from a set of vendors (i.e. the kinds of servers 99% of people will be able to lay their hands on. Another way to put it is that if you're not writing your own BIOS/BMC/etc, you're probably not hyperscaling).

lukeschlather 6mo ago

This seems like a total category error. The Railroads are the only example that actually seems comparable, in being an infrastructure build out that's mostly done by a variety of private companies. Examples of things that would be worth comparing to the datacenter boom are factory construction and utilities (electrification in the first half of the 20th century, running water, gas pipes.)

stefan_ 6mo ago
"Infrastructure build out"? Everything put into these datacenters is worthless well before 10 years have gone by. We aren't even getting infrastructure out of it, they are just powering it with gas turbines..
- jeffbee 6mo ago
  This isn't true and you can easily prove it to yourself by renting a Sandy Bridge CPU or a TPUv2 from Google today.
jeffbee 6mo ago
The other categorical error is that the American people paid the railroads a monumental subsidy to get the job done. We gave them almost 10% of the territory.
- lenerdenator 6mo ago
  Given the size of some of these data centers, the incentives packages that local governments often give their developers, and the impact on the electric grid that can, in some cases, raise costs for other ratepayers, I'd say the comparison could be similar. The one Google's putting in KC North is 500 acres [0] and there were $10 billion in taxable revenue bonds put up by the Port Authority to help with the cost. This for a company that could pay for that in cash right now. [0] https://fox4kc.com/news/google-confirms-its-behind-new-data-center-coming-to-northland/ https://fox4kc.com/news/google-confirms-its-behind-new-data-...

kerblang 6mo ago

Adjusted for inflation? edit - sorry, it is in fact adjusted, text is kinda hard to see

anigbrowl 6mo ago
It literally says 'Inflation-adjusted costs' on the right side of the graph, right under the main title, FFS.
- kerblang 6mo ago
  There's no need to be snide

SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago

Gentle reminder that the cost of producing well-formatted graphs is much, much lower than it used to be. We grew up in a world where the mere existence of this graph would prove that someone put a great deal of effort into making it, and now it does not. I have no specific reason to doubt the information, but if you want to have reliable epistemic practices, you can no longer treat random graphs you find on social media as presumptively true.

deleted 6mo ago

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pier25 6mo ago

https://xcancel.com/finmoorhouse/status/2044933442236776794 https://xcancel.com/finmoorhouse/status/2044933442236776794

losvedir 6mo ago

Does anyone know what's included in "datacenter capex"? In particular, does that include spending for associated power generation? Because whether or not the AI craze pans out, if we've built a whole bunch of power plants (and especially solar, wind, hydro, etc) that would be a big win.

measurablefunc 6mo ago
You can't run a data center on solar or wind (even w/ batteries included). Everything they're building runs on gas & coal like what Musk got running for xAI.
- RealityVoid 6mo ago
  You can and _must_ if you want competitive costs. Musk famously overpaid in order to get speed of deployment. I was reading geohot's musings about building a data center and doing so cost effectively and solar is _the_ way to get low energy costs. The problem is off-peak energy, but even with that... you might come off ahead. And that dude is anything but a green fanatic. But he's a pragmatist.
- rangestransform 6mo ago
  That’s because Rs let NIMBYs and the fossil fuel lobby call the shots, and Ds let NIMBYs and degrowthers call the shots. I bet China isn’t powering their datacenters with gas turbines
  - therobots927 6mo ago
    They aren’t building out datacenters the way the US is. The arms race is a myth.

operatingthetan 6mo ago

Is this an appropriate spend and risk? I'm starting to feel as if we have been collectively glamoured by AI and are not making sound decisions on this.

theonemind 6mo ago
It doesn't seem like it to me. I like watching Ed Zitron rant about it on YouTube. It's fun.
- therobots927 6mo ago
  Same. He’s very knowledgeable about this and very skeptical. Not to mention hilarious. I’m getting my popcorn ready for the bubble pop.
staplor 6mo ago
I’ve had similar thoughts, but I’ve come around to this buildout being rational. All of the big ai labs are still jockeying for compute and are having trouble keeping up with inference demand.

mattas 6mo ago

Is this _actual_ spend? Like dollars actually changing hands? Or is this "we said we are going to invest $X"? What about the circular agreements?

therobots927 6mo ago
A lot of this is committed capital and the datacenters haven’t even broken ground.

cactacea 6mo ago

Really shows where our priorities are at as a country. SMH

throwaway27448 6mo ago

Further evidence that the US, for whatever reason, lacks basic ability to rationally use resources.

guywithahat 6mo ago
If you adjust for GDP railroads were much more expensive, and I don't think they're viewed as a mistake https://x.com/finmoorhouse/status/2044985790212583699?s=20 https://x.com/finmoorhouse/status/2044985790212583699?s=20
- ElevenLathe 6mo ago
  It's not totally clear that the gigantic push to run rail lines through undeveloped parts of North America "ahead of demand" for reasons of genocide (aka "white settlement"), especially the transcontinental routes, was the smartest investment, even leaving aside the horrific crime it represents. We probably would have gotten greater ROI connecting more developed places on a piecemeal basis and extending the rail network more slowly in the West (and probably even more rapidly in the developed East) instead of founding new towns along brand-new rail lines. There is a reason the federal government was so involved in the finance of these things: left alone, private Eastern capital would not have done things the way they were done, which was chiefly to "open the frontier" aka accelerate the genocide. I certainly think it was a mistake.
emp17344 6mo ago
It’s just a classic bubble. They’ve happened before, and while they are irrational, the market sorts itself eventually.
tim333 6mo ago
The US has mostly ended up quite prosperous if not that environmentally friendly.
- throwaway27448 6mo ago
  In some measurements, sure. But we're god awful at rationally using our wealth

bawana 6mo ago

only 20% of health care spending!

vrganj 6mo ago
And 0% of people cured.
- dilberx 6mo ago
  everything is business, less about humanity

amelius 6mo ago

We could have had a space elevator by now.

pstuart 6mo ago
We could have had non-carbon energy independence by now.
- therobots927 6mo ago
  But the AI fanatics claimed that AI would solve cold fusion, making that whole thing moot. The only problem is, if AI doesn’t solve cold fusion, we’re back to square one. And a few trillion dollars in the hole.
  - boxedemp 6mo ago
    If we're counting, the USA was already pretty deep in the hole. Anybody that has experienced crippling debt understands there's a point of no return where you just embrace it. And that point is right before rock bottom.
    - tim333 6mo ago
      Government debt is different - mostly gets inflated away.
  - danilocesar 6mo ago
    There’s a joke that in a couple of years, after spending trillions of dollars, burning mountains of coal to run country-sized datacenters and boiling all the oceans, we finally achieve AGI. Then the first question we ask it is: 'How do we fix climate change?' And it answers: 'you can start by unplugging me'
- big-and-small 6mo ago
  China is working on this.

jgalt212 6mo ago

Just wait until the DAOs become agentic!

hargup 6mo ago

Justin Lebar (he built xla compiler and worked at OpenAI) has an amazing talk about this subject https://youtu.be/cyJU32ivIlk?si=gYuHtzMJIvaSqcht https://youtu.be/cyJU32ivIlk?si=gYuHtzMJIvaSqcht

uejfiweun 6mo ago

Does anyone have any plans for what to do with all these chips and things once they are obsolete? I can't imagine they are all just going to go to some scrap heap.

moogly 6mo ago
I have bad news for you...

thelastgallon 6mo ago

I wonder what percentage of GDP is spent on crypto.

tim333 6mo ago
Crypto's a funny one economically as while there are some real costs like mining, a lot of the money is just swapped around like A makes a coin, B pays A a million for some but the million isn't really spent, just swapped between crypto idiots.

philip1209 6mo ago

Would love to see Apple’s china investment on this chart.

abofh 6mo ago

Not if you include tax breaks as mega projects

dlenski 6mo ago

There's a pretty big missing case in this comparison: nuclear weapons. The US spent ~$12 trillion in ~2024 dollars on nuclear weapons between 1940 and 1996, and the vast majority of that spending was in the 1950s and early 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_States#:~:text=Between%201940%20and%201996%2C%20the%20US%20spent%20over%20US%2411.9%C2%A0trillion%20in%20present%2Dday%20terms%5B15%5D%20on%20nuclear%20weapons%20infrastructure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...

casefields 6mo ago
This is called paltering, which is lying telling by telling the truth. The delivery systems are included when coming up with that number. So all those submarines, bombers, and ICBMs are also counted. All 3 systems of course are still valuable and useful without nuclear weapons.
- dlenski 6mo ago
  What a strange and uncharitable response. 1. ICBMs. I question your claim that these are "of course" valuable without nuclear payloads. No ICBM has even been used in war (there's a questionable case of Russia using an experimental missile in 2024 in Ukraine). Certainly, without nuclear payloads, they would be a lot less valuable. 2. Submarines, bombers. Yes, these general categories of vehicles have military value beyond delivering nuclear weapons. The specific ones that are most likely to be used for delivering nuclear weapons were developed and built for this specific purpose, often at extremely high cost (with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_B-2_Spirit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_B-2_Spirit as a specific example). These delivery systems for nuclear weapons wouldn't have been built in such great numbers and at such great cost if not for their intended purpose of delivering nuclear weapons.

spprashant 6mo ago

I think all misgivings about AI would go away fast, if it solved one important problem for humanity. Carbon nanotubes for space elevators, sustainable nuclear fusion, or something in that ilk.

therobots927 6mo ago
Well it can build a killer front end and that’s great at impressing investors.
sixhobbits 6mo ago
Personalized medical treatment looks like the most promising candidate so far, would that do it for you?
- therobots927 6mo ago
  What exactly does “personalized medical treatment” entail? Writing prescriptions? Ok, I can see how AI could theoretically do that (assuming it doesn’t hallucinate and kill a bunch of people). Oh and don’t think it’ll be so easy to give AI the legal authority to prescribe controlled substances. And insurance companies may take issue with expensive prescriptions written by a chat bot. Perform surgeries? Stitch wounds? That’s decades away. And that also opens a legal can of worms. Maybe the AI lawyers can figure something out.
  - jnpnj 6mo ago
    maybe he's referring to people doing research on their own variant of disease through LLMs to find cures
    - therobots927 6mo ago
      That’s fine and dandy but it won’t do anything for most people with serious health problems.
      - 6mo ago

arisAlexis 6mo ago

Because this is the last invention of man and they realize this

silexia 6mo ago
This is the sentiment most AI experts have, and nearly half of them believe it will lead to our extinction.

hashmap 6mo ago

if you think datacenters are a waste (they are), wait til you hear about department of war spending

danielmarkbruce 6mo ago

It's not a project. It's just a lot of money being spent on compute across hundreds/thousands of similar projects. An analogy would be "all the money spent on transportation infra" over some period of time.