The Global Race to AGI : Winner Takes All

The Quest to build the world's first AGI is rapidly turning into DeathRace 3000

Google (Alphabet) announced in their latest earnings report that they have doubled their data-center buildout (cap expenditures) vs. last year. This year they are on track for ~$50 billion of new datacenter builds, and CEO Pinchai says that the majority of that is for AI training & inference. That investment is fully 1/6th of their total revenue. I am continually astounded by the scale of this endeavor.… and I’m a jaded Silicon Valley veteran.

Its important to note that Alphabet (Google) is just one company. Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon are publishing very similar CapEx figures for AI infrastructure buildout, and we can safely assume that Apple is not far off. The Dark Horses in this cut-throat race are Tesla & nVidia.

So if all those players are in the same range, that’s a minimum
$350 billion annual invest in AI. That doesn't include 2nd- and 3rd-tier players, or startups like OpenAI & Anthropic. That doesn't include 98% of the Fortune 500. That doesn't include government & military. That doesn't include nation-states. That doesn’t include China, or Japan, or Germany.

The resources being poured into the quest for AGI are unparalleled in human history. They actually make both the Manhattan Project (1945), and the Apollo Program (1969), look trivial in comparison. Those investments (unprecedented in their day) were $2 billion for the Manhattan Project (~$35 billion in 2024 dollars), and $25 billion for the Apollo Program (~$200 billion in 2024 dollars). Those were total program costs. It took about 5 years to build the atomic bomb, and 13 years to put a man on the moon. Yet even in inflation-adjusted dollars, the one year present-day spend on the quest for AGI far exceeds the total budgets of both those programs, combined.

Total global 2024 AI investment is easily in the trillions (USD), annually (Sequoia). And it will only grow. Perspective: the global GDP (total value of all human labor/production) is roughly $100T annually. Are these sane bets? If the answer is, as Sam Harris (quote at 9m50s) and Max Tegmark claim, that the first one to the "finish line" claims the entire pot — i.e. the capitalist variant of “winner take all” — then, um... Yes.