How Much Is Being Spent on Data Centers?

Christopher Schmidt, who works for Google and is a founding member of the Alphabet Workers Union, posted this thread today on BlueSky:

In 2026, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle plan to spend $725 billion on data center buildout.

I wonder what other things in the economy are happening at that scale. Like, how does this compare to, I dunno, all road-widening projects? Or global solar installations?

It's hard for me to picture what $725B looks like in terms of capital expenditures.

Like, Massacusetts has a $16B 5-year capital plan; expanding that per-capita to the US means something like $260B/year for the combination of all states in the US, so AI capex is 3x larger than all state-level capex spend.

It looks like the 2024 estimate of CapEx for solar installed in the US was $1.61/W, and US solar added 43GW in 2025, so total solar installed at that rate in the US in 2025 was around $69B (nice), so it's around 10 times as much as all US solar installations in 2025.

Total construction on US highway projects in 2025 is estimated at $188B, with ~$50B for expansion projects, so it's 4 times as much as all US highway spending, and 15 times as much as all highway expansion spending. 

He continues with numbers on urban rail, private home construction, and some numbers from other parts of the world. 

Then:

Total outlays for physical capital by the US government in 2025 were expected to be $463B as of March 2025. So the data center investment by hyperscalars is expected to be 50% higher than all US federal government physical capital investments combined.

So in 2026, the $725B capex to be spent on data centers:
 - 40% more than new housing construction.
 - 50% more spending than the US federal government.
 - ~3x US state capital spend.
 - 8x all of Africa infrastructure.
 - 5x all global rail.
 - 4x all US highway spend.
 - 10x US solar spend.

He ends by comparing with the boom and bust of U.S. railroad expansion, 1867–1873, which led to the devastating Panic of 1873.

Tom Tomorrow and Flaming Hydra

It's time for my more or less annual reminder to support cartoonist Tom Tomorrow's Sparky's List, as all of the publications that pay cartoonists go out of business in this media environment. 

With it, you get an early view of his weekly comic, which tries to make sense of this indescribable time we are living through, plus his additional thoughts on it, and comments on life in New York City and sometimes an inside view of minor celebrity culture from a guy who's been on the edge of things for 40 or so years.

This week he shared an extra comic, which had the benefit of informing me of the existence of flaminghydra.com. It's a co-op of journalists, essayists, and other creatives, many of whom I see on BlueSky. Not sure why I haven't heard of it before. Like all independent media, Flaming Hydra also needs subscribers ($3/month). 

Here's the comic, to entice you to subscribe to either or both... and to once again remind us all of just how batshit the past 11 years have been:

Double the Errors, Double the Fun

If I have to read about Trump's many misdeeds in one my thin local daily newspapers — this one owned by private equity and which I pay way too much money for — I wish it could at least give me headlines that don't have obvious typos.

In this case, there's a flagrant error in both the main headline and the deck just below it: 

Both involving the word "to." Such a difficult one to keep track of.

Clearly they have a thin to nonexistent set of copy editors.
 

Leave It on the Prairie

This morning, I read two stories about the new Little House on the Prairie television series (which I don't plan to watch). Not surprisingly, they both focused on how it differs from the 1970s version and from the books.

The first was brief, and talked only about the way the new show incorporates the Osage in one episode. In the original series (and in the book), the Osage men are unwelcome raiders who take food and jabber in a "savage" language. In the new series, in contrast, the Ingalls family shares the food and Laura sits and talks with them, learning that it's the Ingalls who are squatters on Osage land — which is the historical truth of the situation. The show even creates a Native best friend character for Laura!

The other story was by the Star Tribune's T.V. critic, Neal Justin. He gives details on the new show's greater historical accuracy (the physical hardship and post-Civil War trauma), but also the way it attempts to clean up the books' and the Ingalls' antipathy toward Native people. In the show Ma Ingalls, for instance, quickly becomes a champion for the Osage ("with Jane Fonda-like spunk," according to Justin). That fits with what the other article said about how Laura's interaction is portrayed toward the Osage men who visited.

The Little House books have fallen from favor among librarians, and Laura Ingalls Wilder's name has been removed from a prestigious library award in 2018 because of these very issues. 

What happens when children watch this rosy new show and then read the books, only to find the racist version in print? We can bet that book publishers will reissue the books with new covers tied in to this series. Where is that Native best friend character? Why are the Osage not even named as such, but instead only called savages?

Who does it help to have this show made at all? Only the owners of the production company and network, the Ingalls Wilder estate, and to a much lesser extent the people who worked on it. 

New ideas are what we need in media — not old, racist stories that need to be left to be understood in their context, not yanked into the present and promoted in a bright, shiny update.

Another Man Is Dead

ICE lies. That's all that needs to be said. 

 

One That's Definitely for the Filing Cabinet

Radley Balko has published an updated version of the guide to research findings on racism in the criminal justice system, which he started when he was at the Washington Post. He left there three years ago.

He says he will continue to update it a few times a year.

There are more than 60 studies listed. A couple of his shortest descriptions:

• A 2023 study used the geolocation data from the smart phones of police in 23 major U.S. cities. It found that police spend far more time patrolling Black neighborhoods than other neighborhoods with similar crime rates and similar socioeconomic demographics. 
• Between 2012 and 2014, the Los Angeles Police Department received more than 1,350 citizen complaints of racial profiling. The department didn’t uphold a single complaint.  

 Balko's page, of course, provides links to all of the studies.

SpudCells!

Have you heard about SpudCells?

This article in the Star Tribune (gift link) almost a week ago was the first thing I saw, but it had been written up in the New York Times as well.  

Bioengineering researcher Kate Adamala and her team have created the first "synthetic cells capable of growing, dividing and self-sustaining." They've made their findings open-source, and created a nonprofit organization called Biotic to "raise funds to perpetuate the communal, global research" that is needed to carry the research forward to the point where the technology can be used to produce plastics or fuels without petrochemicals, or novel drugs. The New York Times story listed another possibility: the cells could draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The Star Tribune article is mostly an interview with Adamala, while the Times article (also a gift link) is more of an explainer. 

Here's a toast to basic science research, the kind of thing that is being defunded, along with all the other things the Trump regime doesn't see a value in.

Ten Years Ago

Philando Castile was killed by a cop named Jeronimo Yanez 10 years ago today. Yanez was charged with manslaughter, but found not guilty just a bit less than a year later.

Since then, Philando's mother, Valerie Castile, became an activist. Much of the coverage of this 10-year anniversary has focused on her work. Ramsey County prosecutor John Choi, who brought the charges against Yanez, continues to speak at the same conferences as Castile, both of them talking about how to handle police shootings.

According to Minnesota Public Radio,

“I'm a different prosecutor today compared to what I was back then,” Choi said. “It changed me as a human being, as a prosecutor, looking at a lot of things and getting to this place where I recognized that it's not right to have the type of policing that resulted in Philando's death.”

In the ensuing years, Choi and local law enforcement departments in Ramsey County have largely moved away from the sort of pretextual stops that led to Philando being pulled over, he said. Preliminary data from a new study shows cities like St. Paul have kept those numbers low.

 It has been a long 10 years since then. 

• My first post on the killing, from the day after.
• My post on the not-guilty verdict.
• There was an effort to name a new training fund for cops after Philando, but that idea was voted down by ... cops.
• A peace garden has been created next to the place where he was killed. 
• His family and friends created the Philando Castile Relief Foundation, which gives small personal grants to families affected by gun violence. 
  
  

That's Just It

Rebecca Solnit wrote about the duality of America for the Guardian. 

Using her able way with words, she provided a number of contradictory pairs that will sound familiar to any fair-minded reader. That was her point in writing, but this was my favorite sentence in the piece:

At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. 

That's just it: we are being ruled by a catastrophic crime scene. Governed is the wrong verb, because I have come to define that word as meaning something other than "imposition of one will over others." 

Bikecentennial

Fifty years ago, it seemed like the Bicentennial was everywhere, all the time. I was a cynical high schooler, post-Watergate, so it all seemed a bit much to me. Constant moments in history on television and red white and blue everywhere for a year or more… it was just a lot of sameness for a young person who lacked perspective. 

I don't remember that there were permanent infrastructure projects completed as part of the Bicentennial, but I've recently been reminded that all of these were timed to mark the anniversary:

• Opening of the first line of the Washington Metro system
• The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum
• Installation of Marc Chagall's America Windows at the Art Institute of Chicago
• The renovation of the building that became Landmark Center in St. Paul

I'm sure there are a number of other local projects around the country, similar to St. Paul's Landmark Center or the America Windows, that I don't know about. All of these were permanent gifts to the country or states where they're located. Investments in the future, not just temporary celebrations.

One event that happened that year that I never heard about at the time — different from the usual fireworks or dress-up recreations — was the Bikecentennial.

From CoolBikeArt: 

As the USA commemorates its semiquincentennial, the question arises: What's the best way to celebrate a country's birthday? Fifty years ago, over 4,000 riders embraced the Spirit of '76 by cycling from sea to shining sea. It was known as Bikecentennial.


The main route, called the TransAmerica Trail, wound 4,250 miles (6,840 km) through small towns and less traveled roads from Astoria, Oregon to Yorktown, Virginia. Cyclists could participate in smaller sections of the route, but about 1,750 riders signed up for the entire length of the ride.

The riders were self-contained, carrying all their gear on their bikes. They either camped or stayed in community centers, church basements, and school gymnasiums.

"Two months with everything I needed on the bike made me realize that people, including me, have so much unnecessary stuff. All we really need is enough food, a warm and dry place to sleep, enough clothing to survive, something to interest your mind, and a few friends." –Walter Johnson

"Many cyclists who took part in 1976 (and those who take TransAmerica trips today) say essentially the same thing about the experience: 'I learned more about this country in 90 days than most people learn in a lifetime'." –Dan D’Ambrosio

Bike Centennial continues today as the organization Adventure Cycling, so that has also become a permanent gift. This is their write-up about the 1976 ride.

Of course, there's nothing like Bikecentennial for this year's 250th anniversary, and as far as I know, no lasting physical infrastructure projects, either. 

About Those Pardons

I have a hypothesis about Trump's 250 pardons for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Of course, if it happens, people will pay him bribes for the pardons. That's not the hypothesis.

My thought is that it wasn't his idea. At this point, he's surrounded by people who are falling over themselves to come up with the next worst thing he can do. I bet one of those reprobates came up with this as both a way to stick it to his haters, and to give him another bite at a bunch of bribes. 

You probably heard that it has become well known at major law firms that a million or two million dollars buys anyone a pardon these days. That's what we've come to. 

By the way, if you have access to Apple TV, I recommend Star City for a fictionalized look at life in the USSR in the late 1960s. It provides a glimpse of what it's like to live under the type of government today's Republican Party would like to institute here in the U.S. 

We All Belong

I was afraid I had lost track of Philip Bump, the former Washington Post writer. He stopped posting on his blog some additional thoughts back in March, and when I would see him on All In With Chris Hayes, they said he was now with something called CT Insider. What the heck is that?

Well, I guess it's a publication in Connecticut? I still don't get it, but I guess he gets to write what he wants, like this: My family has been here since 1621. That is not what makes me American.

He's a data guy, so he made some cool graphics showing how young this country is, based on things like his own patrinomial lineage and this one of the U.S. presidents, where just four overlapping presidents' lifetimes get us back to 1776:

(Click to enlarge.) 

John Adams to Grant to FDR to Biden. That's all it takes to cover 250 years. 

More importantly for the point of the article, he wrote:

... in 2024, about 25% of immigrants to the United States had arrived before 1990. A quarter of immigrants, then, had been here for at least 1 out of every 7 years that the U.S. has existed.

About 16% of immigrants in the U.S. last year arrived before 1984, the year [J.D.] Vance was born. In other words, they've been here longer than Vance himself. And yet they for some reason supposedly have less purchase on the nation's identity and values than does he? 

Many of my own ancestors arrived in Rhode Island (and Massachusetts and Long Island) in the 1630s, so not quite as early as Bump's, but close. 

I have no patience with ladder-pullers like Vance, let alone recent immigrant-descendants like Stephen Miller, Samuel Alito, or Donald Trump, whose own grandmother was six months pregnant with his father when she arrived in the U.S.! It's a big country, made better by the presence of immigrants. 

Learn to share, as taught in the religions you supposedly belong to.