Derek Thompson

We'll repeat them a lot through the show, but let's start with number one, economic strain.

This is basically asking the question,

Is investment in this sector large enough to bend the economy the same way that railroads bent the economy or the dot-com bubble bent the economy?

A third of recent GDP growth can be traced to data center construction right now.

That's enormous.

Why isn't that big enough to make us afraid of a bubble in AI?

There's two ways, I think, to tell the story that you just told.

One is that we used to not build things in the physical world, and now we're building things in the physical world.

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