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Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

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Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#111

Post by LeCompteSftware »

timmg wrote: post #3

This tweet shows it as a percentage of US GDP: https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142 Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big **'n deal the railroads were!

It seems a little silly to put 71 years of private-and-public-sector infrastructure development alongside something highly targeted like the Manhattan Project. It might make more sense to compare the Manhattan Project to the first transcontinental railroad, as a similar targeted but enormously ambitious project amounting to a major technical milestone.

Likewise I don't think it makes sense to compare post-ChatGPT hyperscaler data center construction with all 19th-century US railroad construction. Why not include the already considerable infrastructure of pre-AI AWS/Azure? The relevant economic change isn't "AI," it's having oodles of fast compute available online and a market demanding more of it. OTOH comparing these data centers to the Manhattan Project is wrong in the opposite direction: we should really be comparing a specific headline-grabber like Stargate.

This categorization is just a confusing mishmash. The real conclusion to draw here is that we tend to spend more on long-term and broadly-defined things than we do on specific projects with specific deadlines. Indeed.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#112

Post by rayiner »

manquer wrote: post #73
timmg wrote: post #3

This tweet shows it as a percentage of US GDP: https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142 Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big **'n deal the railroads were!

GDP adjustments are warranted, but it is more stark than both the estimates suggest. The megaprojects of the previous generations all had decades long depreciation schedules. Many 50-100+ year old railways, bridges, tunnels or dams and other utilities are still in active use with only minimal maintenance Amortized Y-o-Y the current spends would dwarf everything at the reported depreciation schedule of 6(!) years for…

Great point!

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#113

Post by bigfatkitten »

jamesknelson wrote: post #102
wr2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also railways would always have alternative uses at that time - e.g. logistics in warfare. What other uses do GPU's have that are critical...? lol In addition to your points, this is why I always laugh when people do backward comparisons. What characteristics do they share in common? Very little.

GPUs do have a use in warfare though. I mean, LLMs are basically offensive weapons disguised as software engineers. Sure, LLMs can kind of put together a prototype of some CRUD app, so long as it doesn’t need to be maintainable, understandable, innovative or secure. But they excel at persisting until some arbitrary well defined condition is met, and it appears to be the case that “you gain entry to system X” works we…

> GPUs do have a use in warfare though.

Unclassified public cloud GPUs are completely useless when your warfighting workloads are at the SECRET level or above.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#114

Post by nullhole »

wisemanwillhear wrote: post #54
lukeschlather wrote: post #10

This seems like a total category error. The Railroads are the only example that actually seems comparable, in being an infrastructure build out that's mostly done by a variety of private companies. Examples of things that would be worth comparing to the datacenter boom are factory construction and utilities (electrification in the first half of the 20th century, running water, gas pipes.)

For some reason this reminds me of people at work who walk up and say we did x bazillion things in n time, and then pause and expect us to express shock at how amazing that is and how much more productive they are than other teams. So what. Without a proper comparison to something equivalent I can't evaluate whether it's exceptional. I could treat each molecule as a thing and tell people how incredibly many things I…

"Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something" - Mitch Hedberg

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#115

Post by bigfatkitten »

operatingthetan wrote: post #38
dghlsakjg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The railroads and the interstate are arguably the biggest and broadest impact, especially in 2nd order effects (everything West of the Mississippi would be vastly different economically without them). I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it ha…

>I am not an ai-booster, but I would not be surprised at AI having a similar enabling effect over the long term. My caveat being that I am not sure the massive data center race going on right now will be what makes it happen. Maybe? It seems as if the tech is starting to taper off already and AI companies are panicking and gaslighting us about what their newest models can actually do. If that's the case the industry…

Bernie Madoff and his ilk made way for Sam Altman and his friends.

Like Madoff, they’re desperate to pump their Ponzi scheme for as long as they can.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#116

Post by casey2 »

maxglute wrote: post #101
timmg wrote: post #3

This tweet shows it as a percentage of US GDP: https://x.com/paulg/status/2045120274551423142 Makes it a little less dramatic. But also shows what a big **'n deal the railroads were!

Depreciation schedule: Tulips: weeks GPUs: 6 years Fiber: 20-50 years Rail, roads, bridges: 50-100+ years Hyperscalers closer to tulips than other hard infra.

What rail, road or bridge in the US lasts 50 years? The maintenance of rail over 6 years costs more than replacing all the GPUs in a data center, even at their current markup.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#117

Post by bdangubic »

casey2 wrote: post #116
maxglute wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depreciation schedule: Tulips: weeks GPUs: 6 years Fiber: 20-50 years Rail, roads, bridges: 50-100+ years Hyperscalers closer to tulips than other hard infra.

What rail, road or bridge in the US lasts 50 years? The maintenance of rail over 6 years costs more than replacing all the GPUs in a data center, even at their current markup.

have you seen our rails, roads and bridges?!? 50 year old ones in many places are being referred to as “new ones” :)

the only reason any “maintenance” on them is expensive is corruption which at municipal level rivals current administration in some places

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#119

Post by jhide »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #113
jamesknelson wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPUs do have a use in warfare though. I mean, LLMs are basically offensive weapons disguised as software engineers. Sure, LLMs can kind of put together a prototype of some CRUD app, so long as it doesn’t need to be maintainable, understandable, innovative or secure. But they excel at persisting until some arbitrary well defined condition is met, and it appears to be the case that “you gain entry to system X” works we…

> GPUs do have a use in warfare though. Unclassified public cloud GPUs are completely useless when your warfighting workloads are at the SECRET level or above.

They’re unclassified public cloud GPUs today, much the same as the massive industrial base of the United States was churning out harmless consumer widgets in 1939. Those widget makers happened to be reconfigurable into weapon makers, and so wartime production exploded from 2% to 40% of GDP in 5 years [1]. But the total industrial output of course didn’t expand by nearly that much.

I think it’s maybe plausible that private compute feels similar in the next do-or-die global war.

[1] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...

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