> The hyperscalers have already outspent the most famous US megaprojects

[criticalangle@mastodon.social]

@cwebber bubble

[buermann@mastodon.social]

@shaknais

It's a better proxy for productive capacity than a price index based on wildly different baskets of consumer goods over the centuries.

And since when were apollo or the Manhattan project or the international space station or the interstate highway system private programs?

[shaknais@mastodon.social]

@buermann

That's my point. None of those programs are private. However, the data centers _are_. It is unusual when the spending of private corporations outstrips that of their own government, on infrastructure.

Which is why GDP seems a bad fit, here. Because it uses the investments by private corps as part of its calculation, but doesn't fully cover government spending in the same period.

[iank@hostux.social]

@cwebber I suspect there is something important that is misleading about that graph, and I don't know quite what it is, but here are clues. A "data center" in practical / technical terms, is not defined by the computers inside it, but by a building (real estate), and the power & network connected to it. I walk through a floor of a data center in the Boston area every few weeks, for the past 5 years. I see maybe 200 racks, and room for 200 more. A large empty room, extremely little change. (1/2)

[iank@hostux.social]

@cwebber The company, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Tower , has 27 data centers, 10 billion in revenue, it is not a small player, and its revenue and stock price have been flat over the past few years. So, I have to wonder how much of this kind of this stuff is at the same level of reporting as science reporting constantly telling us about the breakthrough that is about to cure cancer.

[marcel@waldvogel.family]

@darkuncle @cwebber
It's a measly 4 or 5 billion USD (4.3*10⁹ CHF)
https://home.cern/resources/faqs/facts-and-figures-about-lhc

[bms48@mastodon.social]

@cwebber OOPSIE!

[mhartle@mastodon.online]

@cwebber Contrast this with current revenue generated by AI providers running on top of these and future necessary revenue these providers would need to generate during the lifetime of these data centers for a positive ROI.

[buermann@mastodon.social]

@shaknais

Government spending is included in GDP. Public and private investment recruit from the same pool of capital.

[di4na@hachyderm.io]

@cwebber
is this spending or announced future spendings?

[nwin@mastodon.ie]

@Di4na @cwebber I think it’s spending as my understanding is that the announced figure is ~$5t by 2030.

[shaknais@mastodon.social]

@buermann

Government spending goes into debt, not profits. Governments usually go into deficit on purpose. The investment is not visible, in the same way, in the same timeframe.

[thias@mastodon.social]

@darkuncle @cwebber the LHC was not a US project, and cost only between 4.7 and 6.5 B. That’s a most a third of what Facebook paid for WhatsApp. Probably less than a week of Iran war.

[buermann@mastodon.social]

@shaknais

Do you think that the private sector does not finance its capital spending with debt, or doesn't do it on purpose, or something? We were at one point comparing the scale of capital flows into infrastructure projects, the structure of the financing is irrelevant.

reuters.com

(www.reuters.com)

[stompyrobot@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@cwebber

The counter argument is that computational intelligence grows our ability to do things (grows the economy) to keep paying for it.

The first railroads, power lines, and cell phones seemed like excessively expensive boondoggles in the beginning.

[shaknais@mastodon.social]

@buermann

If there's no difference, why do we even use the debt-to-GDP ratio for measuring governments at all, then?

[dtabb73@mastodon.africa]

@cwebber
I found a handy website (https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.4800.2x16384) to track the price of various types of RAM. I use DDR5-4800 2x16GB in my recently-purchased used laptop. The chart suggests this pair of DIMMs increased in cost by four-fold over a period of about six months!
#bioinformatics #DenyAI

[graydon@canada.masto.host]

@aeva I have no idea if you can usefully search the term, but "capital strike".

This is the idea that holders of capital/capital as a social entity asserts power not by not spending (it's capital, it can't not be spent, that's not how it works) but by spending on harmful things.

And once you're fueling the whole thing off habitability loss/certain genocide/upping the risk of human extinction, a little social collapse hardly seems notable.

@cwebber

[dacmot@sunny.garden]

@cwebber and all we have to show for this insane waste of money is slop, lies and technical debt. Yet somehow the decision makers keep thinking the problem is that we're not spending enough money.

[buermann@mastodon.social]

@shaknais

Debt ratios indicate the sustainability of a budget under different interest rate scenarios, whether a household or a corporate conglomerate or national government, whether the denominator is income or assets or an aggregate estimate of total production. E.g. to get a read on the sustainability of the present federal budget under existing interest rate conditions you would look up net interest payments as a share of GDP:

Federal Outlays: Interest as Percent of Gross Domestic Product

Graph and download economic data for Federal Outlays: Interest as Percent of Gross Domestic Product (FYOIGDA188S) from 1940 to 2025 about outlays, federal, percent, interest, GDP, and USA.

(fred.stlouisfed.org)