Colossus 1
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Why are tech billionaires making the biggest AI bet in history?
This is Search Engine. I'm PJ Vout. Lately the canniest fifteen year olds I know are putting all of their allowance towards buying fractions of NVIDIA stock. It only goes up, they'd help me. With the wisdom of people who have finally figured everything out in life. My teenage investment advisors inform me that It keeps going up because the AI companies have promised that one day soon we'll reach a kind of machine superintelligence that, among other things, justifies these vast oceans of investment. It's funny, I do actually believe AI is a very useful, certainly socially transformative technology for bad and for good. I believe that. And I also believe that we're probably in a bubble. Because a bubble would just mean that once again, investors have gotten a little too excited about a genuinely promising new technology.
The sheer fortunes being spent on AI. Already are so large, it's hard to find the right precedence to compare to. And what we know is that the size of the bet means we're all to some degree in this. Whether this pays off or crashes or lands in between The AI bet is one of the big stories of our time. But as big as it is. It can also feel abstract. And so a reporter here wanted to go see it. Visit the most prominent real world manifestations of all this money. The data centers, the buildings powering AI, which have already begun to transform American towns and cities. She learned things that surprised me about what's happening right now, about the untested assumptions that have led us here. And about how it might look if things go wrong.
The story begins in the part of America that has built the most data centers, even before the starting pistol of the AI race had been fired. Our reporter is Struthi Pinamanini. I'm gonna let her take it from here.
Chapter one. The gold in the ground. Ashburn sits on the very northern tip of Virginia, right by the Potomac. Driving around on the main roads here. Everything looks so flat. It's more lawn than trees, lots of short fences behind which are these very square, very squat, windowless buildings. So you can see that, you know, we're on Loudon County Park right now and uh more data centers here on the left. Um my guide today is Buddy Riser, shaved head, dark suit. And this county that he's driving me through in Northern Virginia, Loudoun County, it has the highest concentration of data centers in the world. And you second place is a sleepy little town named Beijing. Everything you're seeing is data center. Data center here, data center there, data center there.
This is data center alley proper. Honestly, I'm I'm uh I I've read a lot about this before getting here, but the scale of just the construction is mind-bending. Like everything is being built right now and that's on top of a whole lot that already existed. That's correct. I mean often when I take people on tours they think, Wow, I've heard a lot about it, but this exceeds my expectation. And what you have to remember is that this is one of f five clusters here, right? There's the Sterling cluster, there's the Leesburg cluster, there's the uh everywhere you look there's either data centers or data centers under construction. Cranes abound. This building frenzy, it has certainly gotten an adrenaline shot from AI.
Some of the new unfinished buildings we were seeing were AI inference centers. But Buddy told me that construction here has been going nonstop for many years. That really it began back when we were all first starting to store our data in the cloud. Back then, this was the late 2000s, Google had announced Google Docs, you didn't have to save documents on your hard drive anymore. Amazon had announced Amazon Web Services, meaning startups could borrow Amazon servers, they didn't have to own their own anymore. And the invention of the cloud would be a huge deal. It would change almost everything about the way we use the internet. There is money to be made here. And Loudoun needed that money. The county was reeling from two successive crises, the dot-com crash and then the mortgage crisis.
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