Silicon Tolls and Political Quicksand
Naturally, Nvidia will collect its customary toll. Every extra rack of compute demands stacks of expensive graphics processors. But before we surrender entirely to the breathless hype, I think it is wise to splash some cold water on our faces.
Building gigawatt-scale infrastructure is violently expensive. It consumes vast sums of capital upfront, strains municipal power grids, and takes years to deliver.
Cash fires burn quickly when expectations run ahead of reality.
Then there is the rather awkward political issue. TikTok remains a bipartisan punchbag in Washington. Pinning multi-billion-pound infrastructure plans on a customer facing persistent regulatory scrutiny strikes me as an unusually daring parlour game.