Bennett Hoffman

The US needs data centers to win Data centers multiply your nation's money. It's an IRL money glitch Imagine the consequences of never building railroads during the industrial revolution, but 100x For example, SpaceX rents out one MWh of compute for ~$5700. The electricity for that costs ~$75, and with the GPUs and overhead it likely costs ~$1250 all in to produce the MWh of compute. Fully rented, every $1 you put in gets you $4 out. This multiple is rising as we build more datacenters and models get smarter. The arbitrage is widening, not closing. Anthropic's revenue per megawatt nearly 4x'd in a single year. People in France aren't using Mistral. People in Japan aren't using Sakana. They use ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Using any LLM that isn't on the cost / intelligence frontier is foolish, since you'd spend more money for worse results. (See ArtificialAnalysis frontier below) The only rational choice for any individual abroad is to use American superintelligence, since it gives you the most intelligence per dollar. Around 28% of Anthropic's revenue was international in the first half of 2026. A lot of Anthropic's revenue now flows to SpaceX, which charges ~$5,700 per MWh for compute that Anthropic turns into ~$6,800 (per SemiAnalysis). You can see why owning the datacenter is lucrative: SpaceX makes more profit than Anthropic does for every token Anthropic serves on SpaceX's GPUs. (Also, it's likely that around half of OpenAI's revenue comes internationally.) So, when you convert $1 to $4 by putting it into an AI datacenter, around $1.10 to $2 of that is the United States absorbing money from abroad. This money is used to fund more AI development and more data centers, which grows the arbitrage. Most of these dollars stay domestic, so long as we can build more datacenters here. As time goes on, superintelligence compute will become the dominant spending category. Every country that does not have a frontier model, or more specifically, their own datacenters to serve American frontier models, will eventually have a huge share of their spending flowing directly into the US to companies that re-invest in the US. How does this benefit anyone here? Many reasons: - Domestic tax revenue will skyrocket. - For the average American who can invest in the stock market, asset prices in American companies like SpaceX will skyrocket. - The dollar gets very strong: other currencies are sold for dollars to buy American tokens, which makes imports much cheaper. - The US will be able to afford inference from the best models, way more than other countries, which leads to massive increases in productivity in every sector. (With robotics, this means clean, beautiful cities - which I'm excited for). This is the path to Universal High Income. In the industrial revolution, this happened with railroads: countries that built railroads and industrialized, such as the US, were able to produce such a high volume of goods for the first time that they absorbed global wealth. The railroad buildout made the US rich. We can do it again. The only thing that matters politically in the next few years is securing the future of our datacenter buildout.