> The hyperscalers have already outspent the most famous US megaprojects

[gimulnautti@mastodon.green]

@cwebber It feels like we’re creating a new ”oil”. On purpose.

A global dependency on compute cycles, with control in very few private hands.

Ready to hold the world hostage line Iran in the Strait of Hormuz..

This is genuinely scary shit.

[akamran@indieweb.social]

@cwebber this is a mind boggling waste of money

[pjakobs@mastodon.green]

@cwebber are those inflation corrected values? Apollo dollars were about 4x of today's dollars iirc

[npars01@mstdn.social]

@flashesofpanic @musicman @cwebber

Niall Ferguson has observed that financial crashes precipitate wars, big ones

The bankruptcy of the corrupt Canadian railroad private-public partnerships in the early 20th century started a domino that cascaded into WW1

List of defunct Canadian railways - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

Canadian Government Railways - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

The story of Canadian National Railway

Explore Canadian National Railway’s history, freight dominance, privatisation, Bill Gates’ stake, pandemic impact and why investors value rail infrastructure.

(freetrade.io)

Historian Sarah Paine talks how the wealthy's response to the corruption & crash of 1929 led to WW2 & 90 million deaths.

Corruption, crash, war -- a not-lovely cycle

[neilk@xoxo.zone]

@cwebber Adjusted for GDP, it is still pretty respectable

Not quite the Marshall Plan, way behind railroads https://x.com/finmoorhouse/status/2044985359281381690?s=20

Still it just seems impossible. Does this represent orgs with committed budgets or actual spend? We can make warehouse style buildings almost instantly but we can’t make GPUs that fast.

[outfrost@mastodon.social]

@cwebber the railway situation makes a lot of sense in this context

[screwlisp@gamerplus.org]

@cwebber
What if you norm this graph by the net worth of the world's richest person at the time.
@akamran

[tabaer@iosdev.space]

@cwebber

Much of this will turn out to be wasted

[bart@floss.social]

@pjakobs @cwebber Yes.

[pjakobs@mastodon.green]

@bart @cwebber ah yes, could just have looked at the bottom right corner. Lazy me.

[bart@floss.social]

@pjakobs @cwebber Or top right.

[neilk@xoxo.zone]

@pjakobs @cwebber Inflation-adjusted. However, others point out that a percentage of GDP is a fairer comparison, see my reply.

[ghostonthehalfshell@masto.ai]

@cwebber

Reality only about 5% of 10% of all the data centers announced are actually being built. They don’t have the customers and they don’t have the energy to run the chips. If they do run, they last about 18 months.

That’s 18 months to make a return on investment.

[wronglang@bayes.club]

@cwebber yeah that should've gone into railroads, railroads and healthcare

[cassandravert@indieweb.social]

Future projections will be influenced by whether they can escape liability for the damage they cause.

[wilbr@glitch.social]

@faoluin @cwebber we won't need "taxes" when the water wars start, just copies of Paolo Bacigalupi's book "Water Knife", a weapon, and the holy guiding hand of Jesus himself

[gladtherescake@todon.nl]

@neilk @cwebber But GDP rises because of any investment, if you have a huge investment that leverages a huge part of your economy and then compare it to GDP it's going to mostly cancel out because you're putting two correlated variables at both ends of the equation. So I don't think that's a reasonable thing to do at all.

[buermann@mastodon.social]

@Spirit @cwebber

We can recycle the silicon and steel into the solar panels and wind mills we couldn't afford to build instead.

[buermann@mastodon.social]

@cwebber

What index did they use for the inflation adjustment?

[catmisgivings@stranger.social]

@cwebber now I'm looking at us railroads through the lens of a bubble investment and wondering if after all the loss of life and resettlement we could even call them a success from our standpoint in 2026