Essay by Eric Worrall
“… That $1 trillion could have been used for anything. It could have been invested in renewables. …”
Nobody Asked for AI
…
The Big Tech companies have spent $1 trillion on capital investment since the start of the artificial-intelligence boom. Pretty much all that investment has been used to build data centers, purchase the chips that power those data centers, and construct the energy systems that fuel and cool them.
That $1 trillion could have been used for anything. It could have been invested in renewables. It could have been used to develop lifesaving new drugs. It could have been used to build housing, public infrastructure, or anything else human beings need to survive and thrive.
Instead, it has been channeled into constructing energy-draining, water-absorbing data centers that power large language models (LLMs) built on the theft of millions of people’s creative work, which consistently produce incorrect responses and drive many users mad in the process. It’s hard to think of a worse use of society’s shared resources.
…
After years of hype and trillions of dollars, the AI boom will leave us with a captured economy, a corrupted democracy, and a devastated environment. We’ll be told that this is just how markets work — sometimes they go up, sometimes they go down. But this narrative obscures how decisions are really made in capitalist economies.
As I showed in my book, Vulture Capitalism, capitalist economies are characterized by pervasive central planning. Monopolistic corporations work with corrupt politicians to decide who gets what, while using “the market” as a veil to conceal their power. The AI boom is no different. A few powerful capitalists decided that we would spend several years devoting all our time and money toward the development and roll out of AI — and so we did.
…
Read more: https://jacobin.com/2026/08/ai-llms-monopoly-bubble-capital
“capitalist economies are characterized by pervasive central planning”. Yep that sounds right – not. I mean heavily interventionist governments like the European Union frequently try to pick winners, and just as frequently get it wrong, if Europe’s dramatic decline from 90% of the USA’s GDP to 65% over the last 10-15 years is anything to judge by. And I’d hesitate to call a government which absorbs just under 50% of the products of people’s labor “capitalist”.
Companies try to plan for the future, and very large companies will have plans which affect a lot of people. But to describe this as “central planning” seems a stretch – except maybe in jurisdictions where companies effectively operate as an extension of government policy.
To be fair I haven’t read Grace’s book Vulture Capitalism, so perhaps I have not understood the context of her claim. Perhaps she means the EU.
The US Government has also tried picking winners, though not to the same extent as the EU. Another important difference is some US Government picks did actually win. The technological spinoffs from the space programme likely ushered in the current era of US economic exceptionalism. Let’s hope the US Government’s dalliance with AI investment is one of the good picks.
As for spending that trillion dollars which was invested in AI, spending it instead on renewables, I doubt that would have made any difference other than to make us all poorer, given the trillions of dollars which have already been wasted on renewables for no tangible benefit.
As I’ve said elsewhere, AI is creating substantial productivity benefits, so at least we’re getting something back for all that investment in AI.
Whether the current crop of insanely leveraged AI tech champions are financially viable is an entirely different question to whether AI will provide long term benefits to the US and global economy. My favourite analogy to the AI boom is the 1800s railway era. Most if not all of the early railway entrepreneurs went bankrupt, but railways still transformed the US economy.
As I’ve said elsewhere, AI is creating substantial productivity benefits,
so at least we’re getting something back for all that investment in AI.
___________________________________________________________________________
Like what? While reading through the above and all the $Trillions being
spent I’m thinking, “Yeah what’s the return on investment?” If you invested
in Microsoft or Apple you made money because Apple & Microsoft have
products that people decided to buy. How is AI going to make money
and make investors rich? What are they going to sell?
“What are they going to sell?” Efficiency.
Exactly! Steve Case does not seem to understand how different our current life is compared to even 5years ago!
AI is everywhere, the device in his pocket, on his wrist or the one he used to write his article, anything he bought in the last 5 years was influenced by AI one way or the other, maybe just the logistic optimization getting the items out to him.
Gemini AI says that about $10T was spend on solar and wind in the last 20years, so an extra trillion would be a 10% effect, not zero, but also not significant. (Remember how difficult internet research was before AI??)
Amazon is a leader when it comes to selling AI and cloud services, why would is invest $1T?
Gemini says “”Amazon has accumulated a $496 billion contracted backlog of cloud and AI commitments.””, it seems that over time there should be a massive return from that investment!
You are correct, Steve.
The link I provided which contains a realtime video demonstration of vibe coding shows how AI delivers an 800% productivity boost for software development, and discusses how this productivity boost is spreading to other fields.
Applications for AI are exploding.
AI has all but killed the Climate Change™ hoax as it is exposed to more real data and being open to logical thought processes. You can “reason” with AI. Try to reason with Climate Botherers.
MS Copilot advised me that it was originally trained on CMIP6 models for its climate knowledge but now has real data to assess. That is why all AI now accepts that ocean surface temperature is constrained to an upper limit around 30C.
I am long retired but still dabble in data analysis and I have found AI extremely useful to improve my data handling ability.
That $Trillion dollar investment in AI will make our economies more efficient.
If those funds had been invested in wind, solar, batteries, etc., our economies would have been much LESS efficient, with high energy costs as in Europe, the poster child/continent appendage of energy and other dysfunction
I am also a bit sceptical about AI but pretty sure the markets at all levels will sort it out and it will find its place, in time. It may just take over the jobs of those who dispense expert opinion. And many government employees.
It can also carry out many mundane tasks.
Tempting to go to an AI on my browser, paste in the Case comment, then paste AI’s response here. US space program’s stated goals didn’t do much for my life. Yet I have a GPS running watch. 50 years later mission-creeped administratively-captured NASA is losing to billionaire vanity startups? Cool. Solar panels and battery cars still need subsidies? Not cool.
Sometimes I am gob smacked speechless by stupidity.
Subsidies make people think in stupid ways, with stupid outcomes.
As a result they get paid to demonstrate in the streets, because their stupidity has reduced them to that level.
Accuse the opposition of doing nasty things that you have been doing.
Yep.
Describes EXACTLY what communism / socialism aspires to – crony capitalism.
A company can’t become a monopoly without a lot of government assistance.
I couldn’t stop grinning as I read this. Thank you, Eric, for bringing extra joy to my day.
Yep they’re hurting 🙂
Sounds to me like a socialists solution but I’ve never read the book Vulture Capitalism.
Off topic somewhat…
I was driving behind a car with Minnesota plates yesterday and of course the slogan on the plate is “Land of 10,000 lakes”. I know it can get pleasantly warm in the summer there but it is freezing cold in the winter and the land of ice (and ICE which many residents hate)
I thought it might be a good place for climate keyboard warriors and all greenies to vacation in the winter to avoid the overheating and soon to be burning up of the earth. They could enjoy ice fishing and other wonderful winter sports as well.
I heard a rumor that the city of Minneapolis is designing their own license plate.
It will read “Welcome to Minneapolis Land of 100,000 Somalis”
The climate worriers can travel there and visit the Somalis who have business experience ie The Learin Center, Feeding the Future and others as well as politicians who have benefited from Somali expertise. The climate warriors can learn how to set up those businesses elsewhere and add big $$ to their climate grift.
Obviously, just some humor!
“Obviously, just some humor!”
Humour is best when based on facts… 😉
The version our American friends from Michigan gave us was: “Minnesota, land of 10,000 lakes and a zillion mosquitos”.
Yep, the land of 10,000 mosquito incubators.
Of course those little bludgers have nothing on our Alaskan breeds which average 6 foot wingspans and fly in formation.
Like drone warfare
Have them fly into International Falls Airport, There is a sign on the main terminal that loudly and proudly proclaims “The Icebox of the Nation”. They could take in a tour of the paper mill. If they catch the weather just right, the ice cycles hanging off the caustic tanks are world class.
Minneapolis, the land of millions of Somalis and near-zero others, if Somali birth rates and infiltration rates continue in the future. All these additional births will be voting US citizens.
West Europe is only a few years ahead of the U.S. regarding Islamic takeover.
Because the current US population is all native and always was…
Those natives supported themselves, unlike Somalis who suck from government tits wherever they are, except in Somalia, which is too poor to have government programs
Those government teats are refilled with tax payer dollars.
Think (/sarc) of all the wind and solar that could be deployed if the illegal aliens did not have their hands in the till.
American Indians are not illegal immigrants.
Of course, many of the tribes drove other tribes off their land. The tribes that lost their land recognized they lost it due to tribal wars or agreements.
Did you know that the Shawnee were once natives of Georgia? They were driven out by the Cherokee. Then another tribe drove out the Cherokee. (The Shawnee ended up in Ohio and the Cherokee in Tennessee.)
PS Did France “steal” Alsace-Lorain from Germany or was it the other way around?
Do you understand the picture?
Yes.
Do you understand my comment?
They were here (where now is the US) before all others.
https://willempost.substack.com/p/europes-decline-from-a-lofty-perch
Colonization and the Great Dying in the New World: European colonization resulted in the “Great Dying,” where introduced infectious diseases (smallpox, measles, influenza, etc.) killed up to 90% of the indigenous population in North and South America, amounting to roughly 55 million deaths by 1600. This rapid depopulation was so significant it caused vast areas of agricultural land to be abandoned and reforested. This die-off took place before Roanoke Colony 1585, Jamestown Colony 1607, and Plymouth Colony 1620.
How Britain stole $45 trillion from India and Lied About It
https://willempost.substack.com/p/how-britain-stole-45-trillion-from
Empires at war in Europe, often were also at war in North America and other parts of the world, resulting in significant casualties in colonies and wars between tribes of indigenous populations.
In the New World, which after the Great Dying was nearly empty, European empires were fighting each other for pieces of the New World to extract wealth to enrich themselves beyond anything imagined. Slaves from Africa had to be imported to reduce labor shortages.
President Andrew Jackson (1829 – 1837) significantly expanded US territory while orchestrating the systematic removal of native tribes, using the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
His policies, aimed at moving tribes west of the Mississippi, directly led to the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of Cherokee, Muscogee Creek, Seminole, Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes, with deaths estimates of about 4,000 Cherokee and up to 15,000 total deaths overall. All these deaths came after their populations had been diminished by up to 90% prior to 1600.
US Civil War (1861 – 1865): President Lincoln freed the slaves, which greatly diminished the economy of the US South. After the war, the population die-off was continued by exterminating native tribes and driving the remainder onto reservations to clear the land for newcomers.
Mass-killing of bison (a bounty was offered for a skull) by the US Army and others, deprived millions of indigenous people of their main sustenance, such as the Blackfeet, Sioux, Cheyenne and Comanche tribes.
She lives in some weird alternative reality.
That said, the current AI boom reminds me strongly of the ‘dotcom’ boom circa 2000. That didn’t end well for speculating ‘investors’, and this likely won’t either. AI fund Situational Awareness already went bust and just got bailed out by Citadel.
I’ve taken profits on my tech shares. The bust isn’t far away.
Yep but we still have Amazon.
This is the continuing argument. E.g. all that money spent on the space program could have been spent on feeding the hungry. Actually, the space program is way more important than feeding the hungry for a couple of reasons. The release of sequenced CO2 is returning the biosphere to its former health, and more food is being produced. Any hunger today is caused by political or personal choices (drug addiction). Secondly, the space program will advance knowledge and will raise the quality of life for everyone. The advancement of human knowledge is always more important that individual people’s wellbeing, particularly because, in today’s world, those who are not existing better than their ancestors have choosen to live that way, i.e. they elected communists and socialists and/or they have choose a life style of laziness or addiction or malcontentment.
And many, many people unquestioningly accept whatever AI tells them as Gospel truth. Imagine what our wannabe overlords can put over on the unthinking public now.
How very true. If I read an article or a comment, (all too often on this site too), where the person makes a ‘call to authority’ by quoting an AI then I know that A, the person has nothing worth listening to and B, I’m safe to skip the comment, it’s probably rubbish.
Maybe all those $trillions wasted on Net Zero should have been spent on AI – then it might be a bit better than giving a machine gun to a monkey and being surprised by the results.
OT but reminded me of this. 😎
https://youtu.be/R2R-VOsBPS4
They could have given me that $trillion.
If well trained (i.e. by learning actual science), AI should easily dismiss renewables and expose other greens absurd claims as incosistent and not sustainable.
Greens know that, that’s why they hate AI.
The issue of a ‘well trained’ LLM is actually very complex. For example, to ‘understand’ language it also has to ‘understand’ statements about things that are not true. Some simple obvious ‘science’ examples:
It’s a text generator, there is no understanding.
The link I provided contains a real-time video demo of AI delivering an 800% productivity boost to software development. Whether you call it a text generator or an artificial intelligence, its remarkably astute with the text in generates, or in this case the software code.
The problem with AI, (when used as you advocate), is that it will do as it is told without any thought of if this is correct, beneficial or even moral.
Imagine if some the world’s earlier tyrants had access to AI. What questions would they have asked and what would the world look like IF they had been 800% more effective?
Sometimes being useful but without a conscience is NOT a good thing. AI fits that bill.
The guy who invented machine guns thought his weapon would be so terrible it would end all wars. Now they are indispensable infantry equipment.
Remember the tyrants whose abilities are amplified by AI are opposed by rebels whose abilities are similarly amplified. In fact the brutal darwinianism of rebelling against effective tyrants suggests rebel movements which survive overall would be better at using AI than the tyrants they are trying to tear down.
Speaking of tyranny, it’s going to be very interesting watching the trajectory of AI in China. At the moment their dictatorship is excited about the opportunities for enhanced monitoring, but the same AI which makes monitoring more powerful can also be used to disguise subversive activity. Passing messages through games, advanced steganography, bypassing official gatekeepers. I anticipate sometime in the next few years the Chinese dictatorship will panic and wreck their own AI industry.
This is not quite true. In Oz, the government push AI and have the courts to support them. Anyone opposing the published doctrine is cast aside without funding, without support and will lose in court should it ever be raised.
Governments will not allow the citizens to win. It’s not a level playing field, AI involved or otherwise.
They are terrible and they did not end wars, but “merely” increased the body counts.
Unfortunately, the data that is fed into LLM type AI has a high percentage of biased material. The AIs that I have tried, seem to be biased to what is “consensus”. The result is GIGO dependent on whatever the recent narrative is.
I think the viable course for AI is to closely feed in only empirically tested data and veer away from the present consensus modelling.
After years of hype and many trillions of dollars, the renewables bubble has left UK and Europe with a dying economy, a corrupted non-democracy, and a devastated environment.
Actually that Western/European decline is due to politicians and virtue signalling gone mad. AI activity, good or bad has yet to deliver its effect.
If AI delivers self promoting mechanical devices independent of human input we may have an interesting though limited future ahead of us…..
I am concerned about AI.
Lots of promises, etc., but so was PCs, Internet, Social Media, Cell Phones, etc., etc., etc.
I have addressed my concerns in other threads.
Those that believe will continue to believe.
Those that do not believe will continue to not believe.
Those that think critically, might just arrive at the same conclusions as I did.
Hint: It is not water or electricity or dollars.
It delivers value – companies which use AI for software development have an 800% productivity advantage over companies which do not. That productivity advantage is starting to spread to other fields, with vibe product design.
Whether that value is enough to justify the share valuation of the current crop of insanely leveraged AI hyperscalers is a different question. I suspect not in most cases.
An AI system writing code will apply code from other sources, (already written blocks), to advance the solution. This is the equivalent of using someone with a vast library of preexisting knowledge, in the old days, we’d call them an expert.
Now ponder this. What if the AI grabs a lump of code that has a backdoor built in, an all too real possibility. What if it was a driver update being coded, or a patch for an on-line meeting program? How many computers would be infected with this AI generated code, (exposing them to hackers or other problems), just because the AI found and inserted a lump of code that did exactly what it wanted without any idea of WHY it was made freely available for use by the AI?
Not all improvements, (gifts), are good, ask a Trojan,
Grabbing blocks of code with security compromises is already an issue the software industry has to deal with, for example if you use popular languages like Angular, you’re already building your system on vast amounts of code other people have written.
Interestingly one of the most effective ways of managing this risk is to use AI to monitor issue logs and automatically apply critical updates.
As for code quality, I agree AI code development by people who aren’t coders frequently leads to disaster, but an experienced coder can lift the hood on the code being generated and provide a prompt like “I notice the code contains SQL injection defects. Please review the code and correct any SQL injection defects”, and the AI will go ahead and do just that (mostly).
Not all faults are detected. Refer to the recent resignation of a Cambridge professor.
The damage to a system is not fixed once a patch rolls out. Private data leaks are forever, the patch always comes later.
My point is the risk from AI grabbing other people’s code is not significantly worse than the risk from programmers reusing other people’s code, providing the person driving the AI is a software developer.
My point is that the person driving the AI has no idea what the hell they are doing. AI will facilitate the rise of the moron through industry.
And of course, I mean more than the current DEI issues.
I hope you’re right. Even valuable technologies have baggage and doing things just because one can seems more common nowadays. Whether we can keep up with such seems to be a valid question especially with an aging population.
My concerns are not derived from economics or efficiencies.
Except the companies that have the trillion dollars to invest in AI are not in either in the pharmaceuticals business or the renewable energy business. And AI might end up designing both new drugs and improving renewables. Oh well, those pesky central planners that only exist in the minds of a self-described Marxist have struck again. In a December 2025 post on X, she wrote: “I’m not an economist. I’m a Marxist. I don’t study ‘the economy’. I study capitalism, a social system in which the wealthy & their political allies… control the resources everyone else needs to survive.” It stuns me how divorced from reality some people can be and still survive. She actually has a job and I presume she gets a paycheck- she also writes books which are sold in the commercial market for profit- you can’t get much more capitalist than that. She’s literally a capitalist entrepreneur.
AI has no intuition, no imagination, no judgement, no morality.
It can help a human arrive at a design more quickly.
It can also help a human arrive at a disaster more quickly.
AI is the sword of Damocles in many respects.
Consider this: Can AI decide the person to whom it gives the wand is the Good Witch or the Bad Witch? Can AI decide if the wand should be given to anyone at all?
These are concerns, but they are not the basis of my personal concerns.
There is a fabulous gem of information in the AEMO Q2 2026 electricity market report.
qed-q2-2026.pdf
The existing pumped hydro income has tanked to just $10.1M. The installed capacity is 2.3GW, which is larger than the proposed 2GW for Snowy Hydro 2. That puts annual earning potential for SH2 at $35M.
WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD INVEST $42bn TO EARN $35M A YEAR??????
Figure 60 on page 38 shows this reduction in income has occurred since the home battery program was introduced. It took a decade for rooftop solar to destroy the economics of grid wind and solar. Just 12 months for household batteries to destroy the economics of pumped hydro and grid scale batteries.
In Q2 2025, price arbitrage on grid batteries was $360/MWh. Q2 2026 it is just $60/MWh.
My point that distributed solar/battery will always have better economic performance that grid scale “renewables” is now being widely acknowledge. Blackout has upped the limit on distributed rooftop 10-fold to 1MW. Blackout’s Capacity Investment Scheme has failed to fire for want of investors stupid enough to take on the ever growing risk.
And we are on the cusp of Latrobe Valley lignite being once again recognised as the lowest cost fuel source in the world. Sitting there in its abundant glory waiting for energy intensive loads.
That’s hilarious, thanks Rick.
All taxpayers in Oz did.
I don’t feel any better for taking part in this investment, do you? I didn’t even get any kick backs.
I suppose the government will call that a win, at least until they reinvest the $35M into something equally as rewarding.
I don’t get it . If ` renewables are most cost efficient , why don’t they welcome the market opportunity ?
In Australia, we are getting frequent ads for the Geely EX2, which has not yet been released in Australia. Apparently it achieved 500,000 units in its first year in China.
It retail pricing starts at USD10k in China. It appears a capable BEV and tipped to sell for AUD26,500 in Australia.
Geely have incorporated AI throughout its workflow and the vehicle reflects that. Time will tell if the durability is adequate. But big market means fast learning.
This is a review of the car by an Australian in China:
2026 Geely EX2 Review: Range, Charging & Specs
This shows why AI is not going away. This vehicle is closer to what I consider economic design than anything coming out of German design offices.
$26,500. That’s a very expensive mobile phone.
Well it’s got the same lifespan and destiny, into the bin it goes when the battery dies.
One constant with socialists, is that they are all convinced that they know how to spend your money better than you could.
This person doesn’t have a clue what they are talking about.
This reminds me of back in the 60s when the laser had just been invented, people described it as a solution looking for a problem. Today we couldn’t manage without it. Some people are very short sighted.
Climate change v. AI: Sounds like a war of religions. (Enter the Jesus freak image at the top.)
I think it’s supposed to be an old hippy.