Derek Thompson

So we're talking about infrastructure boom that is on par with the broadband build out of the 1990s, early 2000s.

Still behind, it seems like the railroad boom of the 19th century, but we're talking essentially about an amount of spending on one emerging technology that is without precedent in at least

60 to 100 years.

How does AI CapEx break down, right?

We're talking about capital expenditures.

So money that's being spent on essentially machines rather than people.

How much of this is chips versus energy versus building the actual data centers themselves?

Is there a good way to think about where all this money is going?

You've compared the infrastructure boom several times to the railroads, the fiber build-out.

You also indicated that there's ways in which that analogy does not hold up.

So I want to get into that, right?

What the analogy misses.

Like the rail that we laid in, say, the 1860s

was still around in the 1890s.

Maybe some of it's still around the 1950s, right?

The fiber optic cable that was laid still works for years.

But I keep seeing news headlines about GPUs getting better all the time, right?

So I wonder, like, are companies buying something they're going to have to replace in like three years?

Talk a little bit about how AI is just fundamentally different than steel rail or fiber optic cable in a way that's really important in understanding what it is that we're building here.

So when people look at the fact that these hyperscalers are spending 200, 300, almost $400 billion a year on, we can call it CapEx, we can call it, you know, just AI infrastructure.