Azeem Azhar

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.

So it's like an instruction that the computer is carrying out.

When we think about these new AI factories, these gargantuan data centers with chips optimized to serve AI models, they're going to be filled with incredibly powerful chips.

I mean, think of the Nvidia ones.

It's a $5 trillion company.

It shipped about 7 million of these GPUs this year.

And they probably added several Zeta Flops to the stock of computing.

What's a Zeta Flop?

A Zeta Flop is 10 to the 21.

So, you know, meaningful addition to the existing stock of computing.

And the thing is that all of this compute is actually being used.

I mean, if you listen to analysts and you talk to the companies as I do, you hear that they are running short of compute.