The Great A.I. Build-Out + H-1B Visa Chaos + TikTok Braces for the Rapture

The scale of current investment can be compared to the Interstate Highway System, which cost approximately $300 billion (adjusted for inflation) over 36 years. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, recently estimated that US companies would spend about $600 billion on AI data centers this year alone. This means the AI industry is projected to spend twice the cost of the entire Interstate Highway System in just one year.

That's right. What stands out is that the leaders of the world's biggest technology companies are effectively saying in unison that they don't care about the cost of building towards AGI or superintelligence, or wherever they believe this technology's final destination will be. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, told Alex Heath last week that he doesn't worry about overinvesting in AI; if anything, he's concerned about underinvesting. Other companies have expressed similar sentiments.

If you can build a software system that automates vast amounts of labor, big companies will no longer need to hire thousands of people. In the end, these investments, even those with nine zeros, will pay off. The question is, how many such companies will there be? I believe there will be at least one, but probably not three or seven. I understand why everyone is vying for position. While this race may not be winner-take-all, it will likely be winner-take-most, justifying massive investments.

If I were to leave our listeners with one key takeaway about this significant AI buildout, it's this: we are not discussing the future; these investments are happening now. Shovels are in the ground, bulldozers are on construction sites, and these buildings are going up. Many are already operational. We are beginning to see the effects these data centers have on electricity prices for consumers. This issue is even reaching the highest levels of national politics. This buildout is now our great American infrastructure project of the 2020s. It remains to be seen what the full effects will be, but this is happening now.