The Golden Opportunity for American AI

post by Annapurna (jorge-velez) · 2025-01-04T10:26:05.430Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

This is a link post for https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/01/03/the-golden-opportunity-for-american-ai/

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This blog post by Microsoft's president, Brad Smith, further increases my excitement for what's to come in the AI space over the next few years.

To grasp the scale of an $80 billion US dollar capital expenditure, I gathered the following statistics:

The property, plant, and equipment on Microsoft's balance sheet total approximately $153 billion.

The capital expenditures during the last twelve months of the five largest international oil companies (Exxon, Chevron, Total, Shell, and Equinor) combined amounted to $88 billion.

The annual GDP of Azerbaijan for 2023 was $78 billion.

This level of commitment by Microsoft is unprecedented in private enterprise—and this is just one company. We have yet to see what their competitors in the space (Alphabet, Meta, Amazon) plan to commit for FY2025, but their investments will likely be on a similar scale.

This blog confirms that business leaders of the world's largest private enterprises view AI as being as disruptive and transformative as the greatest technological advances in history. I am excited to see what the future holds.

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