Compute

Where the record uses it

• Campus Paducah AI/HPC campus
• Campus Stargate Norway
• Scorecard indicator AI-generated research/engineering adopted inside labs
• Dated test Chapter 3, the outer loop, on Anthropic’s date, due 2 September 2027
• Dated test Chapter 7, the frontier’s deployment, due 31 December 2027
• Dated test Chapter 14, AI 2027, an outside forecast, due 31 December 2027
• Dated test Chapter 2, compute moved rather than stopped, due 31 March 2029
• Dated test Chapter 13, mass is money, due 31 December 2030
• Dated test Chapter 13, orbit is a change of landlord, due 31 December 2030
• Person Amodei, Daniela
• Person Baker, Gavin
• Person Brown, Tom

And 5 more in the record.

Also discussed in

• Person Nadella, Satya

Sources that use it

• Dwarkesh Patel with Gavin Leech, The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025 (Stripe Press, 2025) (curated interviews from the Dwarkesh Podcast, 2019–2025, the book’s own note on its text being “The interview excerpts have been edited for clarity and flow”, so each quotation here is the editors’ text, and where the recording differs the chapter cites the podcast’s own row; Amodei’s unpublished 2017 OpenAI memo “The Big Blob of Compute”; Zuckerberg, 2024, as the editors print him: “I think it’s worth investing $100 billion plus in building the infrastructure”, where the podcast’s transcript and the recording have the $10Bs or $100B+ and “and assuming that if it keeps going, you’re going to get some really amazing things… I don’t think anyone in the industry can really tell you for sure that it will continue scaling at that rate” (chapter 5, the ellipsis for “that make amazing products”); Zuckerberg, 2024, energy the coming bottleneck: “No one has built a 1 GW data center yet”, the recording’s a single gigawatt, and of new power plants and transmission lines, “You’re talking many years of lead time”; Dylan Patel, 2024, in the editors’ text and found on no published recording or transcript of the podcast: “In 1990, ExxonMobil was not laying fiber. In 2025, Microsoft is building data centers”; “prior bubbles didn’t have the most profitable companies that humanity has ever created investing in them. They were debt financed instead. AI is not debt financed yet”, the editors’ wording of the recording’s they were debt financed. This is not debt financed yet; Dylan Patel, 2024, in the editors’ text and found on no published recording or transcript of the podcast: “If human capital is infinite, which is what AGI is, then theoretically the returns of AGI are infinite. If I’m Mark Zuckerberg or Satya Nadella, I now have potentially infinite returns — if I get there first” (chapter 6, the book’s closed dash spaced); Aschenbrenner, 2024: a 10 GW cluster “a couple hundred billion”, the recording’s maybe before it dropped by the editors, the payoff test “you have to get to, like, $100 billion a year in revenue”, the podcast transcript’s form of the recording’s eventually you got to get to like 100 billion a year; Aschenbrenner, 2024: “Let’s estimate the GPT-4 cluster at around $500 million”, and of the $100 million figure, “That’s just the rental price. If you’re building the biggest cluster, you have to build and pay for the whole cluster”, the second sentence the podcast transcript’s form of the recording’s you got to build the whole cluster, you got to pay for the whole cluster; Aschenbrenner, 2024, on buying an aluminum smelter’s gigawatt: “a lot of these power contracts are locked in long term. Also, people don’t like it”, the recording’s people don’t like things like this; Aschenbrenner, 2024: “Would you do the Manhattan Project in the UAE?”, “Once the cluster is there, it’s much easier for them to exfiltrate the weights”; Shulman: a percentage point of search share “a billion-dollar matter”, $50–70 trillion of annual wages as the prize, and “the chance of advanced AI happening is relatively concentrated in the next 10 years [between 2024 and 2034] compared to the rest of the century, because we can’t keep going with our current rapid redirection of resources into AI. That’s a one-time thing”; Amodei: datacenter networks “cost as much as aircraft carriers”, a forecast on the recording (we’re anyway heading to a world where), which the editors set as already; Legg’s 50 percent by 2028; Sholto Douglas, March 2024, as the editors print him: “That is exactly the problem. But the key issue is that your base task solve rate is 90 percent. If it was 99 percent, it wouldn’t be a problem”; of the memo, “an unpublished memo he wrote at OpenAI in 2017—before scaling laws, before the Transformer, and before LLMs”, the editors’ order, where the recording they draw on has Amodei saying of the transformer paper It might have been just before. It might have been just after; chapter 5, “Inputs”, the same exchange as the book edits it: “You can put the clusters in the US and in allied democracies. Once you put them in authoritarian dictatorships, you create this irreversible security risk”; “Another thing: They can just seize the compute”; “Suppose we put 25 percent of the compute capacity in these Middle Eastern dictatorships. Say they seize that. Now the US has a 3-to-1 compute ratio.”). In the Sources
• AMD, “AAI 2026: AMD Delivers Full-Stack Compute for the Agentic AI Era,” 23 July 2026 (AMD Helios rackscale solutions “now in production to be deployed by leading AI companies at gigawatt scale”, 72 Instinct MI455X GPUs and 18 sixth-generation EPYC “Venice” CPUs to a rack; “OpenAI expects to bring Helios online beginning in the fourth quarter of 2026, with deployments accelerating throughout 2027”; the release names the MI400 Series and the MI455X, and no MI450). In the Sources
• Apollo Global Management, “Apollo Backs $5.4 Billion Valor and xAI Data Center Compute Transaction,” press release, 7 January 2026 (Apollo-managed funds led a $3.5 billion capital solution for Valor Compute Infrastructure LP supporting a $5.4 billion acquisition and triple-net lease of computing assets, including NVIDIA GB200 processors, to an xAI subsidiary for xAI’s second data center; NVIDIA an anchor limited partner; investors to receive quarterly cash distributions and upside through ownership of the compute assets; on the fund, Antonio Gracias, Valor’s founder: “critical artificial intelligence compute infrastructure” (his statement in the release)). In the Sources
• CME Group and Silicon Data, “CME Group and Silicon Data Partner to Launch First Compute Futures,” press release (PRNewswire), Chicago, 12 May 2026 — the partnership announcement, three months before the launch-date release: the two firms “today announced they will launch a first-in-class compute futures market later this year, pending regulatory review,” the products to be based on Silicon Data’s daily GPU rental-rate indices; Terry Duffy, CME Group chairman and chief executive (“compute is the new oil of the 21st century”), Carmen Li of Silicon Data and Don Wilson of DRW, Silicon Data’s backer (“compute will become the largest commodity in the world”; the release naming him “Don Wilson, Founder and CEO of DRW”). In the Sources
• CME Group and Silicon Data, “CME Group and Silicon Data to Launch Compute Futures on October 5 to Unlock New Way to Hedge AI Risks,” press release, 11 August 2026 (NYMEX-listed contracts, pending regulatory review; each a month’s rent on an Nvidia H100 or Blackwell B200, tracking Silicon Data’s GPU rental-price indexes; Keavey (“compute has become the currency of the AI age”) and Li (“a public, tradable reference price for the resource every AI system runs on”) quotes) In the Sources

And 61 more: search the Sources.

Related terms

• Abstain
• Algorithmic efficiency
• Brake, the
• Colossus
• Consent as a race
• Cross-examination
• Loss
• Moving bottleneck
• Nameplate
• Perpetual
• Power law
• Scaling laws