Dylan Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…If they started right now, how long would it take to build the biggest AI data center in the world? Actually the other thing is, could we notice it? I don't think so. With the amount of factories that are being spun up—the amount of other construction, manufacturing, etc. that's being built—a gigawatt is actually like a drop in the bucket. A gigawatt is not a lot of power. 10 gigawatts is not an absurd amount of power, it's okay. Yes, it's like hundreds of thousands of homes, millions of people. But you’ve got 1.4 billion people. You’ve got most of the world's extremely energy intensive refining and rare earth refining and all these manufacturing industries here. It would be very easy to hide it. It would be very easy to just shut down like… I think the largest aluminum mill in the world is there and it's north of 5 gigawatts alone. Could we tell if they stopped making aluminum there and instead started making AI there? I don't know if we could tell because they could also just easily spawn like 10 other aluminum mills to make up for the production and be fine. There's many ways for them to hide compute as well. To the extent that you could just take out a five gigawatt aluminum refining center and build a giant data center there, then I guess the way to control Chinese AI has to be the chips? Just walk me through how many chips they have now. How many will they have in the future? What will that be in comparison to the US and the rest of the world?…

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