Cade Metz

It's a mind-boggling amount of money, even for people who have spent decades in the tech industry.

OpenAI alone has said it's going to spend $500 billion on data centers in the United States alone.

to drive these technologies.

Let's stop for a second and think about what that means.

$500 billion in today's money could fund about 15 Manhattan projects.

Wow.

It could fund the Apollo program two times over.

And that's just the money to drive AI for a single startup, OpenAI.

All told, if you look at what is being spent across the globe, not just the U.S.,

We're talking about nearly $3 trillion.

That's an awful lot of money for a technology that is transformative, but is in many ways still speculative, meaning what they see in the future is so big.

They, in many cases, believe they're building what is called in the Valley artificial general intelligence, a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.

It's shorthand for a machine that can do all of the economically valuable work that people like you and I do on a daily basis.

They want to essentially replace all human workers.

They want to give the world a technology that can do any job.

That, in theory, is worth all this spending.

But it's worth saying that we don't know how to get to such a goal.

That is a lofty thing to reach for.

But so many Silicon Valley executives remain undeterred.

Jensen Wang, the CEO of NVIDIA.