Tech Giants' Compute Budgets Eclipse US Federal Spending—We Live in Cyberpunk Now
tszzl · x · 2026-08-11
The author argues we now live in an actual cyberpunk reality. Private consortiums are raising funds to build computers and datacenters that dwarf the federal discretionary spending of the American government.
Backed by competing, somewhat aligned machine intelligence, these warring corporations solve math and sciences in server farms—at least in part for marketing reasons. Meanwhile, institutions like the NSF are slashed to bits, and executive statements often act as an anti-signal for truth. Furthermore, mysterious organizations like the Gates Foundation and OpenAI Foundation now control a philanthropic capital base several times larger than America’s annual foreign aid budget, all racing to secure datacenters.
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