10x! 10x! 10x!... The explosion of AI compute
This is what thousands of data centers gets you
The New York Times reported today on Epoch AI’s estimate that the world’s total AI computing capacity will increase 10x by the end of 2028.
To anyone dismissive of this claim: What did you think all those data centers were for? Epoch has been plotting these trends for a while; in January, it reported that total AI computing had been doubling every 7 months.
Bottlenecks seem to have reduced this rate to every 9 months, but these are still doublings we’re talking about. Exponentials can get big fast. That’s kind of their whole deal.
The Times reminds us that in April, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis talked of impending changes “10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed.”
The U.S. has about 10x as many data centers (5,500) as the next closest country, and about 9x the AI compute capacity of China. U.S. companies together control about 80 percent of global capacity.
The article closes with several paragraphs about recursive self-improvement — AI models independently developing more powerful successors. Google’s Jeff Dean says that with more computing power, “you can fully automate the loop. We are at the beginning stages.”
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