The Asymmetry of Selling Compute

A couple of readers recently emailed me a paper by Columbia Business School professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. Its headline estimate is that the US AI buildout “requires approximately $3.7 trillion in annual revenue by 2032 to earn a 10% unlevered return,” a number both the readers and, I suspect, the professor see as a measure of how elevated expectations have become. What I found particularly funny is that around the same time, Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis, probably one of the most bullish voices on AI, told the Big Technology podcast: “If AI revenue is only $3 trillion in 2031, then yeah, we’ll have big problems.”

That perhaps says a lot about how wide the gap between AI bulls and skeptics has become. Regardless of which direction you lean, the scale of the AI investments will almost certainly lead us to a world that is noticeably different from the one we know today.

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