Azeem Azhar

They got to 17 million in revenue after about nine months and they're growing faster than ever before because customers want to pay for this.

And we shouldn't forget that by the end of this year, ChatGPT, that weird experiment that spilled into our lives three years ago,

we'll be making about $10 billion annualized at the end of this year.

And again, that's real money.

And that's money that's been made faster than Facebook got to that milestone or TikTok got to that milestone.

So of course, you get these moments of exuberance.

But they're also examples where real customers are spending real money on products that they really like.

Well, I've looked historically at 18 bubble instances back to the canals in the 1790s and where I could get the data.

What I found was that the threshold where it gets really sticky is around 2% of GDP and really problematic at 3%, which is where the railroads got to in the 1870s.

And the reason seems to be, and it's particularly true in a big and complex economy like America's, that it's a big and complex economy and it can absorb that sort of level.

But I'd also add that

It's actually quite a good thing at this moment where without the build-out of these data centres, the American economy might be heading towards recession.

And the build-out involves things that America has stated and authors like you and your colleague have stated need to happen, which is getting back to building.

When you build a data centre, you pour concrete.

I was speaking to the leadership team of a 140-year-old American engineering firm that

built many of the famous old bridges that you've probably driven across.

They're busy building data centers right now, and it's electricians and project managers and HVAC engineers who are there.

And that feels to me like it's probably quite a good thing to be happening right now.

So I would say that that's...

feels at the economic level pretty interesting.