Chapter 1, the calibration

The test. That the buildout runs at telecom scale is falsified if American AI investment for 2026 stands above 3 percent of GDP for 2026, a share above the 2.8 percent Goldman Sachs’s own projection gives for 2028. That it is not unprecedented in proportion is falsified only if the same figure stands above the 7.3 percent of Britain’s railway mania in 1847. If Goldman has published no count for 2026 by that day, both parts are unscored.

held Held so far. American AI investment in 2026 is projected at about 1.8 percent of GDP on Goldman Sachs’s perimeter, or $581 billion, under the 3 percent line.

From The AI Compute Race. Read the book

Falls due

31 August 2027

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Investment on Goldman Sachs’s perimeter, and GDP on the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s figure

Chapter

Chapter 1 — The Stakes

What the race is for: the belief that a lead in AI can compound into a lasting advantage, how long such leads have actually lasted, and what a trillion dollars a year is being bet against.

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@misc{dryburgh-chapter-1-the-calibration-2026,
  author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
  title = {{Chapter 1, the calibration}},
  howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests/2027-3},
  note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}