Azeem Azhar

And what happens with compute is that consumption continues as capabilities expand.

Now, we've got some empirical data for this, some real evidence.

So a few years ago, I went through the process of estimating the amount of computing capacity in the world every year from 2023 back to the 1950s.

I think I started in 1958.

So essentially, I counted the number of computers of different types and I estimated how much computing each one could do.

and totaled that up to give a sense of the stock of computing in every year, as I said, since 1958.

Now, the counting isn't exactly apples for apples, but it's directionally robust enough.

Now, the normal yardstick I use is to start in 1972.

It's a wonderful year.

It's the year I was born

And I estimate that the total stock of computing power available globally between 1972 and 2023 increased by 11 orders of magnitude, which is roughly a factor of 100 billion.

In other words, we consumed a lot more, astronomically more compute in 2023 over an astronomically large computing infrastructure in 2023 compared to that wonderful year of 1972.

It's a combination of there being many more computers, not just mainframes and mini computers, but also laptops, supercomputers, and of course, our smartphones.

And those computers themselves were much more powerful thanks to Moore's law, making them powerful, more powerful every year.

It turns out that in that 50 or so year, every single year we saw 62% growth in the total computational stock on the planet.

62% compounded for 50 years is a big astronomical number.

So we've really shown that we like having this stuff around, even though lots of the time it sits idle.

And the truth is there's a ton of it out there.

I mean, I reckon, and I may be wrong by an order of magnitude, that there's about 10 to the 22 flops

of compute stock in the world as of 2023, where a flop is a floating point operation.