There may hope for some AI assisted governance software to improve things? Kind of like how Uber type apps have made if harder for cabbies to rip you off.
I wonder if there is any difference between the corrupt elites that control impoverished countries and the corrupt elites that control the biggest corporations. If the CEOs had full control over government (which seems to be their aim, and they are succeeding), what would they do with that power I wonder?
The real issue is far more controversial than that. The issue is not even necessarily the corrupt elites but the culture. And specifically that any new elites that might displace the existing one would just do the same.
Think of Afghanistan as an example, where the US really did create a modern tolerant state ... for a while. Locals didn't want to keep it going, or at least, not enough. Because the idea that there aren't very wealthy Afghans is just wrong. There's entire neighborhoods in Kabul full of luxury villas with people going into fancy restaurants constantly. That's effectively what the Taliban are fighting for.
Maintaining a modern tolerant state is probably harder than it looks. Like in the UK we take it for granted but it's the end result of centuries of sometimes bloody trial and error fixes. People think it's silly we still have a king but look what happened to Russia, France, Germany etc after they got rid of theirs.
Afghanistan might have worked out if the US took a king like role sitting in a fort somewhere and saying ok, you're prime minister to some Afgan after each election. The king role may seem like nothing but if a UK prime minister says sod this I'm ruler for life then the king doesn't endorse them and the king is the head of the armed forces which makes it difficult to do such stuff.
Unless you're gonna no-true-Scotsman this, plenty of wealthy Christians are deeply unpleasant and selfish people. Going to church does not make people good.
I donate part of my wealth to the poor every year and whatever more I feel is adequate based on a code of law e.g religion. I am just an individual. If I was a multi billion dollar conglomerate that incentive would be much higher. To bring the world out of poverty is to enrich all of humanity and my work would benefit from that as more people would benefit from the technology I built. But if the incentive is to spend everything and borrow more to build data centers to fuel addictive services and exploit people then this is quite a disservice to mankind.
You’re demonstrating the problem of averages. While what you are saying might be true on average, it doesn’t negate the point being made, which is that millions of people continue to struggle to survive and live without adequate food, heat, water, healthcare, etc.
Also, there are multiple wars going on across the world that are making the problem even worse.
No, really, there are fewer famines. The UN, who defined poverty in terms of basic necessities, had to review their definition because how do you make UN survive if there weren’t enough poor populations in scope.
Last time I commented something very similar thinking it was the least controversial no brainer thing and multiple people reacted as if it was some Leninist ragebait lol
Wow! This has aged really, really badly. 50 years and many billions of dollars later and we're neither on the Moon or Mars or have significantly enhanced the distribution of food to those in need, let alone international cooperation.
Higher food production through survey and assessment from orbit, and better food distribution through improved international relations, are only two examples of how profoundly the space program will impact life on Earth.
Yes also huge problems and many other industries to speak of. Unfortunately as technology dominates and the most valuable company in the world is producing GPUs we know where it's all headed. I think while gambling and narcotics are very addictive and terrible we have overlooked technology and it's crept up on us in a bad way. Screens are horribly addictive. Maybe even worse than those things mentioned because you can be indoctrinated from birth. Because the cost is almost zero and continuous and the advancements are only trying to drive further addiction e.g Meta's heavy investment in AR and VR. AR/VR plus AI is basically the recipe for virtual worlds which people will prefer over real life. So we'll become even more disillusioned to the worlds problems because we'll prefer to escape to some virtual reality where all our desires are serviced.
Their fancy computer's value is a mote compared to the billions of dollars being poured into AI software and infrastructure. It's a dead horse that shouldn't be beaten anymore. Individual choices are so insignificant as to be effectively meaningless in contexts like this.
Their fancy computer is the tip of a trillion-dollar spear, forged by our precursors who were trying to invent new and innovative ways to blow up half the world while keeping that half from blowing our half up.
There are no clean hands here. Any attempt to claim the moral high ground by dictating how other people should spend their money (or their machine cycles) will meet with the usual degree of success.
People in other countries starve because the people in charge of them are evil not because the people with resources lack benevolence. If you've ever tried to do charity in a foreign country with a foreign culture and language you would be aware of the issues. No amount of outside money in the world could fix these problems. In fact they will make it worse. People need to grow up.
In the United States, starvation doesn't exist so we've expanded the definition to include more people because we really care to feed people. If you've been to countries where actual starvation is a possibility, you'd understand. So tired of this self hating unaware self flagellation.
This is seen in that starvation is effectively solved in the USa (and now runs the other direction; the poor in the US often tend toward obesity instead of starvation).
The “solution” to countries with starvation today is likely massive full-scale invasion and domination; something the modern world doesn’t have an appetite for.
Sure. As if the massive full-scale invasion and domination of Iraq and Afghanistan worked so well. And throwing in more firepower and loosening the rules of engagement won't fix it either.
It boggles the mind how anybody over the age of 20 can think this way.
The primary reason the invasion of Afghanistan failed was because the US tried to pretend it wasn’t an invasion or domination. Telling the local warlords and factions beforehand they just had to outlast things was a plan doomed to failure before it even began.
If the government had sold “we are making this place the 51st state and it will take 100 years to make that happen” there would be an entirely different outcome.
I’m not saying that’s what should have happened. I actually feel nothing should have happened. But if you are going to take extensive lethal action like that, at least man up and be honest over what it will take to be successful.
The US populace is bizarrely afraid of admitting they live the amazing lives they do due to empire. It’s politically untenable to actually state the reality of what it takes to subjugate a population, no matter if the death numbers are similar for abject pointless failure versus eventual success.
> If the government had sold “we are making this place the 51st state and it will take 100 years to make that happen” there would be an entirely different outcome.
Such hubris - nobody would have signed up for that
Exactly. There's no country on the Earth today with the empire dreams and ability of the British colonial period. And nobody is willing to bring it back (and perhaps for very good reasons, mind you).
What we did in Iraq and Afghanistan is an embarrassment and black stain; had we been openly evil and empirical (?) we'd have killed less with a better result.
Yeah America has no ability to colonize other countries. We are not unified enough as a culture to do that. Look at the debacle of Afghanistan.
Like right now there is starvation in Nigeria because Islamofascists from the north are hunting Christians in the south. Exactly how will any amount of American money convince religious zealots to stop being zealots? If anything, a large influx of money from infidels will just make the clerics claim that their victims are foreign operatives. There is nothing we can do other than pray or stage a full scale military invasion. At that point we can either choose to fully administer the place (unsustainable) or we would have to destroy the apparatus that made the situation possible, which is going to look a helluva lot like a genocide. An impossible situation and only one of many across the globe.
Cloud and AI infra already pull in $300B+ a year. Data center vacancy under 1% and they’re power utility constrained. The fiber guys built ahead of demand, these guys are printing money and can’t build new printers fast enough.
But Meta specifically needs returns from AI products to justify the capex. Google and Microsoft eg. have profitable cloud businesses from where they can rent out GPU compute. Meta’s bet is far more risky.
What is NOT their angle; ads, UGC, entertainment experience (algo etc), Metaverse and gaming, communication (WhatsApp, insta etc) and I’m sure they’ll take advantage anything that’s close to their core areas of interest or anything else big. AI is definitely the tide that lifts all boats but if you’re one of the top 5 tech companies in the world then the prize is incredibly large and not yet known.
The investors don't seem to agree, it seems to be sinking rn... Ads? They already sell ads, is their "AI" algorithm better than the current one developed over years by some of the smartest phds on the planet? I very much doubt that.
They have several actually, from computer vision in glasses (RayBan or Quest) to Speech To Text to get commands on such glasses, to "improved" translation via LLMs, to just chat bots in most of their chat solutions. They do integrate into products, it's not just research.
Is it good? No idea as I don't use them but I believe their angle is literally what Zuckerberg said publicly, roughly "Can't miss AI if it's real! Have to be first." which isn't exactly a very deep strategy but they have deep pockets.
>Zuck... “the right strategy to aggressively frontload building capacity” as part of the tech group’s bid to be the first to build artificial superintelligence.
There's one problem. They seem unlikely to be first to build ASI given that Google and OpenAI seem a fair bit ahead and there's stiff competition from xAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek et al.
The leaderboard seems to have Google, OpenAI and Antropic ahead, then X and four Chinese firms, Z, DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi, with Meta behind that.
I'm not sure if they have a decent strategy to get ahead? It seems to me the best bet would be to have some very smart people do a better algorithm rather than building more data centers.
According to Perplexity because instead of going through 20 earnings reports myself, I outsourced the task to Perplexity and then manually checked a few of the numbers to be reasonably sure they were correct.
I would think that no matter what the percentage of AI in the revenue is - mankind keeps automating their work via software. And so far, we automated only very little. We probably can keep increasing it at 30% pa for 10 years. That would mean we just automate 14x more than we do now. In 10 years, that seems not even fast to me.
Do I understand your logic correctly that after 14 years of 30% growth another year is extremely unlikely and after 14.99 years it is almost impossible?
My logic is that we only have to take the next 10 years into account when calculating the probability.
And lots of things grew 30% or more for 10 years.
Bitcoin's market cap grew over 70% pa for 10 over years now.
Amazon's revenue grew over 60% pa for over 10 years in their early days.
I can think of many numbers, but would have to check: global solar installations, smartphone usage are examples that come to mind.
My logic is that past results don't indicate future results, and assuming that the growth rate from the last 5 years will stay the same for the next 10 years is a big "if". For new companies, new products, high growth rates over many years are normal, but we're talking about an established market that has already seen big growth rates over a long time (as the other commenter pointed out). Smartphone sales today are the same as in 2015, because there's an obvious ceiling to growth in that market, and it has been reached a long time ago. Number/power of solar installations is also a very different thing than revenue, because the growth in that market is caused by the rapidly falling prices (~10x in the last 15 years), so the installed power grows much faster than the cumulative cost of that power. As the computing power is still getting cheaper, and cloud usage is already high, with many competitors, I'd expect the revenue growth to slow down in the next 10 years.
Look at all the stuff people do. Almost none of it is automated via software. Look at people on construcion sites, cashiers, cleaning stuff, cab drivers ... all of it is done manually. I am writing this manually, even though I would prefer to just say it while doing the dishes. But there is no good voice interface for browsers yet. And hey, why do I even do the dishes?
I would say we haven't even started automating the world via software.
10 years of 30% growth just means we will spend 14x more on software in 10 years than we do now. Considering we have not even really started using software for automating work, I would be surprised if we stay below that.
You may be right, especially with the growth of applications of software. Personally I'd rather bet on slower revenue growth than the current 30%. Not necessarily much slower, but even 25% yearly growth over 10 years would be a big difference in the end compared to 30%. My thinking is that usage of cloud compute can grow greatly, but with revenues growth lagging behind, because of falling costs of compute (more powerful/efficient CPUs etc), economies of scale, and competition putting pressure on prices. For example AWS operating margin is 34% currently, I expect that to fall as the market matures (but Google's cloud margins are much lower right now).
Ok, Metaverse and AI didn’t work out. But maybe betting billions on the Next Big Thing, while your actual product is descending into anarchy will pay off!
I think Zuckerberg understands something that most people on this forum seem to not understand at all.
Facebook, Instagram, etc... these are all only valuable as network effect monopolies.
Investment into AI can torch billions of dollars and still be worthwhile so long as it's done in the service of protecting those monopolies, because LLMs are both intrinsically threatening to Meta's existence and intriniscally valuable for building better recommender systems when platform monopolists like Apple add privacy protections (cutting Meta off from the data spigot that powers its revenue streams).
Once AIs with no wallets outnumber humans on Facebook, Meta has an existential problem. There is no way to avoid the inevitable, the best one can do is embrace it, and 25 billion is nothing compared to losing your platform.
So, burn tens of billions to infest your own site w/ bots bc it is somehow "inevitable" anyway? Why not spend that to try and make the user experience better for users with wallets? The investors are clearly fed up w/ burning cash and racking up debt w/ no profits to show for it.
> Total Cloud Revenue (SaaS + IaaS): $6.7 billion, up 27%. CapEx (Full Year): $21.2 billion. The company is facing supply constraints, unable to meet the high demand for its cloud services, leading to scheduling customers into the future.
Much lower name recognition for smaller customers. But there are some big big name "AI" & B2C companies who have _huge_ spend with OCI. This isnt "rent a couple of instances" its much more like "provide a couple GW of compute for X years."
It used to have some survival instincts. It was gobbling young companies such as whatapp and insta to keep itself alive. But with metaverse they lost the plot and now desperate to cling on to AI wave. Yep, this dino is gone.
I think everyone has a right to opt out of politics. Nobody should have to pay attention or have opinions or be an activist. But that doesn’t mean their actions aren’t affecting the politics, nor does it make them immune from being judged.
Tens of billions spent on AI data centers. But people still starve across the planet. Amazing.
Capital misallocation do be like that, but I don't think that capital would be feeding children in the Congo if it wasn't for Facebook's latest folly.
The issue is mostly the corrupt elites that control these impoverished counties, not foreign aid or lack thereof.
There may hope for some AI assisted governance software to improve things? Kind of like how Uber type apps have made if harder for cabbies to rip you off.
Which corrupt leaders are going to give over their control to a machine?
You'd have to get rid of them first, but it might help the new lot stay straight?
I wonder if there is any difference between the corrupt elites that control impoverished countries and the corrupt elites that control the biggest corporations. If the CEOs had full control over government (which seems to be their aim, and they are succeeding), what would they do with that power I wonder?
"Corrupt" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
The real issue is far more controversial than that. The issue is not even necessarily the corrupt elites but the culture. And specifically that any new elites that might displace the existing one would just do the same.
Think of Afghanistan as an example, where the US really did create a modern tolerant state ... for a while. Locals didn't want to keep it going, or at least, not enough. Because the idea that there aren't very wealthy Afghans is just wrong. There's entire neighborhoods in Kabul full of luxury villas with people going into fancy restaurants constantly. That's effectively what the Taliban are fighting for.
Maintaining a modern tolerant state is probably harder than it looks. Like in the UK we take it for granted but it's the end result of centuries of sometimes bloody trial and error fixes. People think it's silly we still have a king but look what happened to Russia, France, Germany etc after they got rid of theirs.
Afghanistan might have worked out if the US took a king like role sitting in a fort somewhere and saying ok, you're prime minister to some Afgan after each election. The king role may seem like nothing but if a UK prime minister says sod this I'm ruler for life then the king doesn't endorse them and the king is the head of the armed forces which makes it difficult to do such stuff.
> and the king is the head of the armed forces which makes it difficult to do such stuff.
How did that work out for Russia, France or Germany ?
Stalin, Napoleon and Hitler but they got over it eventually apart from Russia.
If more capitalists were Christian it might. I mean there are capitalists and then there are capitalists.
Unless you're gonna no-true-Scotsman this, plenty of wealthy Christians are deeply unpleasant and selfish people. Going to church does not make people good.
You cannot be both a good Christian and a good Capitalist. It is an "or", not an "and".
Christian capitalist is an oxymoron.
No doubt you have a nice bike or computer or you spend money on something often like movies or board games or something.
Do you argue that money should all go to feeding the hungry?
Poor argumentation. If I spend 25 billion on movies and still have enough money to never care you should ask me again.
What a dumb take.
I donate part of my wealth to the poor every year and whatever more I feel is adequate based on a code of law e.g religion. I am just an individual. If I was a multi billion dollar conglomerate that incentive would be much higher. To bring the world out of poverty is to enrich all of humanity and my work would benefit from that as more people would benefit from the technology I built. But if the incentive is to spend everything and borrow more to build data centers to fuel addictive services and exploit people then this is quite a disservice to mankind.
Humanity is enormously rich. Compare to the state of humanity 200y ago. Pretty much everyone was struggling to survive, to get food and some heat.
Nowadays even the poorest countries are not starving, unless there is a war going on.
You’re demonstrating the problem of averages. While what you are saying might be true on average, it doesn’t negate the point being made, which is that millions of people continue to struggle to survive and live without adequate food, heat, water, healthcare, etc.
Also, there are multiple wars going on across the world that are making the problem even worse.
No, really, there are fewer famines. The UN, who defined poverty in terms of basic necessities, had to review their definition because how do you make UN survive if there weren’t enough poor populations in scope.
yeah but what's it worth if our riches in 2025 are lent from the future with no way to pay back? That's climate change.
Last time I commented something very similar thinking it was the least controversial no brainer thing and multiple people reacted as if it was some Leninist ragebait lol
Conditioning- America is a capitalist social experiment and I mean that literally
One great thing about America is that we won't shoot you at the border for trying to leave.
Seems pretty successful then no for being such a young country. America is literally where all the major tech and internet companies are.
Where I'm pretty sure that the definition of "successful" that you have in mind is one given by America itself.
Yep- this is my point- it's becoming far more obvious how the game is being run now everything is going to shit and they're pulling the plug.
"Hub for all the major tech companies" isn't the only metric that matters, not in the face of its current administration. It so is not.
Like TSMC and ASML?
i think a good counter to this sort of argument is :
https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...
Wow! This has aged really, really badly. 50 years and many billions of dollars later and we're neither on the Moon or Mars or have significantly enhanced the distribution of food to those in need, let alone international cooperation.
Higher food production through survey and assessment from orbit, and better food distribution through improved international relations, are only two examples of how profoundly the space program will impact life on Earth.
As good counters go, this underperforms.
I agree the space program was a bit of a flop but food distribution and poverty stuff has improved
Extreme poverty from 45% to less than 10% https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
Famine deaths about 1/3 https://ourworldindata.org/famines
Gambling market in US has $100bn+ revenue. Tobacco sales in US is $70bn+
People starve and (almost) no one cares.
Yes also huge problems and many other industries to speak of. Unfortunately as technology dominates and the most valuable company in the world is producing GPUs we know where it's all headed. I think while gambling and narcotics are very addictive and terrible we have overlooked technology and it's crept up on us in a bad way. Screens are horribly addictive. Maybe even worse than those things mentioned because you can be indoctrinated from birth. Because the cost is almost zero and continuous and the advancements are only trying to drive further addiction e.g Meta's heavy investment in AR and VR. AR/VR plus AI is basically the recipe for virtual worlds which people will prefer over real life. So we'll become even more disillusioned to the worlds problems because we'll prefer to escape to some virtual reality where all our desires are serviced.
Michigan has plenty of water. But California still has droughts sometimes. Amazing (if you're 14).
And there you are with your fancy computer! Sell it and feed the poor.
Their fancy computer's value is a mote compared to the billions of dollars being poured into AI software and infrastructure. It's a dead horse that shouldn't be beaten anymore. Individual choices are so insignificant as to be effectively meaningless in contexts like this.
Their fancy computer is the tip of a trillion-dollar spear, forged by our precursors who were trying to invent new and innovative ways to blow up half the world while keeping that half from blowing our half up.
There are no clean hands here. Any attempt to claim the moral high ground by dictating how other people should spend their money (or their machine cycles) will meet with the usual degree of success.
What if what I donate every year is 100x the value of a laptop I've owned for 5 years? Your logic is illogical.
Well, you know, we're all doing what we can.
Technological innovation veils our failed morality. I don’t ever see this resolving without God literally showing up to Earth.
People in other countries starve because the people in charge of them are evil not because the people with resources lack benevolence. If you've ever tried to do charity in a foreign country with a foreign culture and language you would be aware of the issues. No amount of outside money in the world could fix these problems. In fact they will make it worse. People need to grow up.
In the United States, starvation doesn't exist so we've expanded the definition to include more people because we really care to feed people. If you've been to countries where actual starvation is a possibility, you'd understand. So tired of this self hating unaware self flagellation.
This is seen in that starvation is effectively solved in the USa (and now runs the other direction; the poor in the US often tend toward obesity instead of starvation).
The “solution” to countries with starvation today is likely massive full-scale invasion and domination; something the modern world doesn’t have an appetite for.
Sure. As if the massive full-scale invasion and domination of Iraq and Afghanistan worked so well. And throwing in more firepower and loosening the rules of engagement won't fix it either.
It boggles the mind how anybody over the age of 20 can think this way.
The primary reason the invasion of Afghanistan failed was because the US tried to pretend it wasn’t an invasion or domination. Telling the local warlords and factions beforehand they just had to outlast things was a plan doomed to failure before it even began.
If the government had sold “we are making this place the 51st state and it will take 100 years to make that happen” there would be an entirely different outcome.
I’m not saying that’s what should have happened. I actually feel nothing should have happened. But if you are going to take extensive lethal action like that, at least man up and be honest over what it will take to be successful.
The US populace is bizarrely afraid of admitting they live the amazing lives they do due to empire. It’s politically untenable to actually state the reality of what it takes to subjugate a population, no matter if the death numbers are similar for abject pointless failure versus eventual success.
> If the government had sold “we are making this place the 51st state and it will take 100 years to make that happen” there would be an entirely different outcome.
Such hubris - nobody would have signed up for that
Exactly. There's no country on the Earth today with the empire dreams and ability of the British colonial period. And nobody is willing to bring it back (and perhaps for very good reasons, mind you).
What we did in Iraq and Afghanistan is an embarrassment and black stain; had we been openly evil and empirical (?) we'd have killed less with a better result.
Imperial is the word you are looking for.
Yeah America has no ability to colonize other countries. We are not unified enough as a culture to do that. Look at the debacle of Afghanistan.
Like right now there is starvation in Nigeria because Islamofascists from the north are hunting Christians in the south. Exactly how will any amount of American money convince religious zealots to stop being zealots? If anything, a large influx of money from infidels will just make the clerics claim that their victims are foreign operatives. There is nothing we can do other than pray or stage a full scale military invasion. At that point we can either choose to fully administer the place (unsustainable) or we would have to destroy the apparatus that made the situation possible, which is going to look a helluva lot like a genocide. An impossible situation and only one of many across the globe.
This is fine. https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/10/the-data-center-bu...
AI build out is more of an extension of datacenter build out though. All the hyperscalers lead AI build out.
Fiber dailed because the telcos overbuilt and demand lagged. When Amazon introduced AWS it succeeded right away because there was lots of demand.
Jeff Bezos Ted Talk 2003 - https://youtu.be/vMKNUylmanQ
Cloud and AI infra already pull in $300B+ a year. Data center vacancy under 1% and they’re power utility constrained. The fiber guys built ahead of demand, these guys are printing money and can’t build new printers fast enough.
But Meta specifically needs returns from AI products to justify the capex. Google and Microsoft eg. have profitable cloud businesses from where they can rent out GPU compute. Meta’s bet is far more risky.
True. But then again they own the consumer side.
If Meta hadn’t invested in AI recommendations a while back they would have lost against TikTok big time.
Think of your 401k getting wiped out, they will let your 401k pay for these data centers. Think about it, these bonds have a 40-year lifespan.
"The social media group had hired Citigroup and Morgan Stanley to raise up to $25bn in debt, ranging from five to 40 years in maturity, "
AI will either steal retirement funds by making scams more realistic, or it will steal them by purchasing OpenAI's IPO.
Waiting for the lack of returns on LLM investments to come and bite back.
Together with the debt payments needed then, this will do wonders for the stock. I’m sure.
What was their vision for AI to begin with?
I totally understand what OpenAI and Google are trying to do with AI but I never understood Meta's angle.
What's Meta's AI product?
What is NOT their angle; ads, UGC, entertainment experience (algo etc), Metaverse and gaming, communication (WhatsApp, insta etc) and I’m sure they’ll take advantage anything that’s close to their core areas of interest or anything else big. AI is definitely the tide that lifts all boats but if you’re one of the top 5 tech companies in the world then the prize is incredibly large and not yet known.
The investors don't seem to agree, it seems to be sinking rn... Ads? They already sell ads, is their "AI" algorithm better than the current one developed over years by some of the smartest phds on the planet? I very much doubt that.
> What's Meta's AI product?
They have several actually, from computer vision in glasses (RayBan or Quest) to Speech To Text to get commands on such glasses, to "improved" translation via LLMs, to just chat bots in most of their chat solutions. They do integrate into products, it's not just research.
Is it good? No idea as I don't use them but I believe their angle is literally what Zuckerberg said publicly, roughly "Can't miss AI if it's real! Have to be first." which isn't exactly a very deep strategy but they have deep pockets.
>Zuck... “the right strategy to aggressively frontload building capacity” as part of the tech group’s bid to be the first to build artificial superintelligence.
There's one problem. They seem unlikely to be first to build ASI given that Google and OpenAI seem a fair bit ahead and there's stiff competition from xAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek et al.
The leaderboard seems to have Google, OpenAI and Antropic ahead, then X and four Chinese firms, Z, DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi, with Meta behind that.
I'm not sure if they have a decent strategy to get ahead? It seems to me the best bet would be to have some very smart people do a better algorithm rather than building more data centers.
I have not looked into Meta, but when I look at the growth of Alphabet's cloud revenue, it looks pretty solid:
https://x.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1984882268817519036
That is revenue from real world usage of their datacenters. Usage their customers would not pay for if it did not have a positive ROI.
A pretty stable growth of 30% per year for the last 5 years. At a current level of about $50B per year.
What is the value of it, if it continues like this for another decade? Revenue would be at roughly $1T/year then.
In the face of this real usage and the growth of it, spending tens of billions of dollars on building out infrastructure looks ok to me.
That's literally just a line go up graph with no details whatsoever? Also, "According to Perplexity" why is it not "according to Alphabet"?
Which additional details would you like to see?
According to Perplexity because instead of going through 20 earnings reports myself, I outsourced the task to Perplexity and then manually checked a few of the numbers to be reasonably sure they were correct.
Oh, gotcha. I thought it was Perplexity themselves reporting about Google's earnings or something.
Like how much of it is actually the "AI" part of the business for a start?
I would think that no matter what the percentage of AI in the revenue is - mankind keeps automating their work via software. And so far, we automated only very little. We probably can keep increasing it at 30% pa for 10 years. That would mean we just automate 14x more than we do now. In 10 years, that seems not even fast to me.
Wow
> What is the value of it, if it continues like this for another decade? Revenue would be at roughly $1T/year then.
That's a big "if", usually things don't grow at 30% per year for 15 years.
Do I understand your logic correctly that after 14 years of 30% growth another year is extremely unlikely and after 14.99 years it is almost impossible?
My logic is that we only have to take the next 10 years into account when calculating the probability.
And lots of things grew 30% or more for 10 years.
Bitcoin's market cap grew over 70% pa for 10 over years now.
Amazon's revenue grew over 60% pa for over 10 years in their early days.
I can think of many numbers, but would have to check: global solar installations, smartphone usage are examples that come to mind.
My logic is that past results don't indicate future results, and assuming that the growth rate from the last 5 years will stay the same for the next 10 years is a big "if". For new companies, new products, high growth rates over many years are normal, but we're talking about an established market that has already seen big growth rates over a long time (as the other commenter pointed out). Smartphone sales today are the same as in 2015, because there's an obvious ceiling to growth in that market, and it has been reached a long time ago. Number/power of solar installations is also a very different thing than revenue, because the growth in that market is caused by the rapidly falling prices (~10x in the last 15 years), so the installed power grows much faster than the cumulative cost of that power. As the computing power is still getting cheaper, and cloud usage is already high, with many competitors, I'd expect the revenue growth to slow down in the next 10 years.
Is cloud usage really high?
Look at all the stuff people do. Almost none of it is automated via software. Look at people on construcion sites, cashiers, cleaning stuff, cab drivers ... all of it is done manually. I am writing this manually, even though I would prefer to just say it while doing the dishes. But there is no good voice interface for browsers yet. And hey, why do I even do the dishes?
I would say we haven't even started automating the world via software.
10 years of 30% growth just means we will spend 14x more on software in 10 years than we do now. Considering we have not even really started using software for automating work, I would be surprised if we stay below that.
You may be right, especially with the growth of applications of software. Personally I'd rather bet on slower revenue growth than the current 30%. Not necessarily much slower, but even 25% yearly growth over 10 years would be a big difference in the end compared to 30%. My thinking is that usage of cloud compute can grow greatly, but with revenues growth lagging behind, because of falling costs of compute (more powerful/efficient CPUs etc), economies of scale, and competition putting pressure on prices. For example AWS operating margin is 34% currently, I expect that to fall as the market matures (but Google's cloud margins are much lower right now).
Ok, let's say 25% growth over 10 years. That is a factor of 9.
9*$50B = $450B yearly revenue.
What could be the margin Alphabet makes from that? Last quarter, Alphabet had $100B revenue and $35B net income. So 35% margin.
$450Bx0.35 = $158B
What is $158B in annual profit worth? Currently Alphabet's p/e is about 30. If we take that, it would be $158Bx30 = $4740B. So around $5T.
If we are heading towards the creation of $5T in value via cloud revenue, investing $100B per year to build it seems not particularly high to me.
Cloud spend overall has - CAGR of 30-35% from 2007 to 2025.
Ok, Metaverse and AI didn’t work out. But maybe betting billions on the Next Big Thing, while your actual product is descending into anarchy will pay off!
Kek. (Before you downvote me for low effort comment, that's the entirety of my argument.)
I think Zuckerberg understands something that most people on this forum seem to not understand at all.
Facebook, Instagram, etc... these are all only valuable as network effect monopolies.
Investment into AI can torch billions of dollars and still be worthwhile so long as it's done in the service of protecting those monopolies, because LLMs are both intrinsically threatening to Meta's existence and intriniscally valuable for building better recommender systems when platform monopolists like Apple add privacy protections (cutting Meta off from the data spigot that powers its revenue streams).
Once AIs with no wallets outnumber humans on Facebook, Meta has an existential problem. There is no way to avoid the inevitable, the best one can do is embrace it, and 25 billion is nothing compared to losing your platform.
So, burn tens of billions to infest your own site w/ bots bc it is somehow "inevitable" anyway? Why not spend that to try and make the user experience better for users with wallets? The investors are clearly fed up w/ burning cash and racking up debt w/ no profits to show for it.
Or, the guy who cheats at Catan just needs the constant ego boost to be able to say "yeah I'm kind of a big deal in Next Big Thing"
Facebook Libra, Metaverse, etc.
Zuck is having a real hard time admitting to himself that Facebook was just luck.
Bezos is also having a hard time admitting amazon was just luck and gates is having a hard time admitting windows was just luck and … :)
https://archive.is/qlPU9
> Oracle sold $18bn of bonds in September.
Why is Oracle going into debt for AI? What are they doing
financing huge deals for use of OCI https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-corp-orcl-q4-2025-0701.... See Q4 FY25
> Total Cloud Revenue (SaaS + IaaS): $6.7 billion, up 27%. CapEx (Full Year): $21.2 billion. The company is facing supply constraints, unable to meet the high demand for its cloud services, leading to scheduling customers into the future.
Much lower name recognition for smaller customers. But there are some big big name "AI" & B2C companies who have _huge_ spend with OCI. This isnt "rent a couple of instances" its much more like "provide a couple GW of compute for X years."
Building data centers for OpenAI, but it requires a lot of upfront capital.
Pumping the stonk one last time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-30/meta-plat...
How is going metaverse?
If Meta manages to die in the coming AI apocalypse it will make me extremely happy. They are an absolute cancer on society.
It used to have some survival instincts. It was gobbling young companies such as whatapp and insta to keep itself alive. But with metaverse they lost the plot and now desperate to cling on to AI wave. Yep, this dino is gone.
Not even a cloud platform to keep it going indefinitely. At least IBM had enterprise customers.
You say that like IBM is gone. They are an enterprise platform and cloud giant (tooling), among many other things. (Quantum, O/T division, etc.)
I honestly think the world would be better without Meta if it did die.
I'm sure other corpos would snatch up all their properties like Threads and IG but still it would be a net positive.
But I just use Instagram to look at photography content. Am I helping to destroy society?
Every click you send to Meta is used to build your personal profile to generate ad revenue. So yes, you’re helping them in a very small way…
I think everyone has a right to opt out of politics. Nobody should have to pay attention or have opinions or be an activist. But that doesn’t mean their actions aren’t affecting the politics, nor does it make them immune from being judged.
How on earth are you still getting Instagram to serve you photos and not month old tiktok videos? I haven't seen a photo in Instagram in years.
Unironically yes? A very small amount, sure. But every eyeball counts.