Derek Thompson

They're data centers, and that's good because building is good.

That's one story.

Another story you could tell, though, is that the data centers...

are pulling resources away from other things we have to build.

Housing, residential investment has plummeted recently.

Manufacturing employment is down.

And one argument that Paul made is that AI and data center construction

is like a black hole, a dying star, a death star that's pulling all of the planets around it toward it, all of the labor and the resources and the capital, all being sucked into AI so that it can't be deployed to, say, build more houses.

How do you feel about that interpretation, that AI doesn't just represent new investment,

It's crowding out investment that we might find more productive over the long run.

Just to make a point really briefly, I heard you say that in the medium or long term, this could be net good for energy generation.

And I think that that qualification is very important because in the next few months, quarters, years, it seems overwhelmingly likely to me that data center construction will

ends up raising electricity prices before it increases energy generation.

But I acknowledge that both things might be true.

I want to get back to something you just said a few minutes ago, which is you compared the build-out of artificial intelligence to the railroads and broadband, the canals of the early 19th century.

But there's a very important twist here.

which is that GPUs, the chips that Nvidia and others sell, depreciate much faster than rail.

You lay steel in the ground, that's steel in the ground that a train can flow over for decades.

You dig the canals, that's a hole that will stay there and the water will bear steamboats for decades.

But GPUs age in dog years, I think, to use your joke.