Doug Burgum

in in pittsburgh all the big players and pittsburgh is a natural location for ai lots of cheap energy carnegie mellon pitt are there and so it was very interesting to see the juxtaposition there but we are seeing this incredible capex the hyperscalers are

obviously been in an arms race, the big five, the big seven.

We estimate that that is approximately 1% of GDP a year.

Wow.

So $300 billion.

Wow.

That's being spent on AI.

And in my perfect world, which never happens, we would go through this big CapEx boom.

And then sometime in 26, the CapEx boom would hand off to a productivity boom.

You mean the AI boom?

Well, look, we've seen throughout history that technology can drive these things.

If you go back, I'll talk about the ones I was around for.

I was not around for the railroads.

But I used to teach economic history.

1880s, 1890s, the railroads made it 10 times faster to cross the United States.

We had this incredible productivity boom.

It was the gigantic GDP growth and it was disinflationary.

So imagine you're having double digit GDP numbers and inflation was minus two, minus three, minus 4% just because the costs were coming down.

Then in the 1980s, under Reagan, we had what I would call a deregulatory boom, because hard for everyone in this room to remember, but everything used to be regulated.

Price of airline tickets, telephone bills, banking services.