Derek Thompson

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.

NVIDIA is making high quality chips right now that in two, three years will not be the frontier.

And so these companies, if they want the best kind of pre-training, will have to buy a new set of chips.

I genuinely don't know how this is going to work.

If these companies have to spend...

collectively half a trillion dollars every three years on the best GPUs, how are they ever going to make back this money?

You mentioned revenues, and I think we should jump right there.

Your second gauge is what you call industry strain.

And that's basically an answer to the question, are industry revenues commensurate with capital expenditures, right?

Are these companies making back the money that they are spending on the infrastructure to build AI?

And this is where I'm particularly interested in your case, that this isn't bubblicious, right?

By your own calculation,

Data center capex is roughly $370, $400 billion.