Part VIII · The New Machines
By 2025 the four largest US tech companies were spending more on AI data centers in a single year than the Apollo program cost, and OpenAI's Stargate proposed $500 billion more. But the binding constraint had moved: the chips were available. Power was not. Capacity is now planned in gigawatts — the largest infrastructure build in history, or the largest bubble.
The money · combined Big-Four capex
Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta together. 2024 is actual; 2025–26 are guidance, plus Morgan Stanley's estimate of the whole global buildout through 2028.
2025 guidance, per company: Microsoft ~$80B · Amazon $100B+ · Alphabet ~$85B · Meta ~$66–72B
The new constraint · power
The unit of capacity planning is no longer servers. It is gigawatts.
~1 GW
draw of a single large AI data-center campus — the output of a large nuclear reactor, roughly a mid-sized American city. (Stargate's Abilene flagship: ~1.2 GW.)
Global data-center electricity (IEA, Apr 2025):
In the US, data centers could be ~half of all growth in electricity demand this decade. PJM's capacity auction jumped $2.2B → $14.7B in a year.
Stargate (Jan 2025, OpenAI · SoftBank · Oracle) — over four years, $100B deployed immediately. The figure is aspirational, a statement of intent, not a bank balance — more than the inflation-adjusted cost of the Apollo program.
The bubble question. The capital assumes AI revenue grows to justify it; by 2026 the revenue was real but far smaller than the spend. The analogue that haunts the bears is the late-1990s telecom boom, which overbuilt fiber and bankrupted many builders — and whose fiber then powered the next decade. Microsoft moved to restart a Three Mile Island reactor; Amazon bought a campus next to a nuclear plant; grid interconnection queues now stretch for years and transformers are back-ordered.
SOURCE · NEURON MAKERS, Ch. 36 (“The Supercycle”) + research dossier 05 (Compute / Nvidia / Money). Underlying: company capex guidance; Stargate announcement (Jan 21 2025); IEA “Energy and AI” (Apr 2025); PJM 2025-26 auction; Morgan Stanley. 2025–26 capex, the IEA 2030 projection, and Stargate's $500B are guidance/forecasts/targets — all labeled as such.