Azeem Azhar

But as we saw, once you make

the output cheaper, you increase the demand for it.

It's a Jevons paradox.

It's that positive elasticity of demand that I talked about.

Because as the outputs become cheaper, you widen up the range of use cases that were previously too expensive to attempt.

They weren't economically feasible and a software optimization made them more cheap.

They crossed the break-even point.

And so we then created new tasks for them.

And I think that's really important to understand that, of course, optimizations and efficiencies are really, really desirable.

But there is something peculiar about the act of computation, the act of processing information, the act of processing that information to help us make better decisions or invent new things or tackle difficult problems.

That means that there's an unending array of things that we'd want to point this capability at.

So when I look at the market today and there's this febrile activity around the chip companies and the infrastructure companies, it's very easy to get lost in that noise and to say, how can this possibly be true?

to say, this is just a lot of kids running after a soccer ball on a pitch.

This is the dot-com again.

But I ask myself in 10 years or in 20 years or in 30 years, will humanity be doing more computations or will we be doing fewer computations?

I mean, the answer is almost certainly that we will be doing more.

Much, much more.

That 62% annualized growth in computational stock that I calculated years ago, it's held for decades.

And it's even being accelerated by this AI build-out.

And that's one reason why this is so different from every other infrastructure boom.