This tweet shows it as a percentage of US GDP:

https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142

Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big **'n deal the railroads were!

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.)

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

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.

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

~$6.5 trillion

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?

We could have had a space elevator by now.

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.

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.

Adjusted for inflation?

edit - sorry, it is in fact adjusted, text is kinda hard to see

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

only 20% of health care spending!

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?

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.

Just wait until the DAOs become agentic!

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

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

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