Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from Leopold Aschenbrenner
EssaySituational Awareness: The Decade AheadJun 4, 2024
But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness. Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them.EssaySituational Awareness IV: The ProjectJun 4, 2024
By 28/29 the intelligence explosion will be underway; by 2030, we will have summoned superintelligence, in all its power and might.EssaySituational Awareness IV: The ProjectJun 4, 2024
By the early 2030s, the entirety of the US arsenal (like it or not, the bedrock of global peace and security) will probably be obsolete.EssaySituational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar ClusterJun 4, 2024
Do we really want the infrastructure for the Manhattan Project to be controlled by some capricious Middle Eastern dictatorship?EssaySituational Awareness: The Decade AheadJun 4, 2024
Hundreds of millions of AGIs could automate AI research, compressing a decade of algorithmic progress (5+ OOMs) into ≤1 year.EssaySituational Awareness I: From GPT-4 to AGIJun 4, 2024
I make the following claim: it is strikingly plausible that by 2027, models will be able to do the work of an AI researcher/engineer.EssaySituational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar ClusterJun 4, 2024
The trillion-dollar, 100GW cluster alone would require ~20% of current US electricity generation in 6 years; together with large inference capacity, demand will be multiples higher.EssaySituational Awareness IV: The ProjectJun 4, 2024
Ultimately, my main claim here is descriptive: whether we like it or not, superintelligence won’t look like an SF startup, and in some way will be primarily in the domain of national security.EssaySituational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar ClusterJun 4, 2024
White-collar workers are paid tens of trillions of dollars in wages annually worldwide; a drop-in remote worker that automates even a fraction of white-collar/cognitive jobs (imagine, say, a truly automated AI coder) would pay for the trillion-dollar cluster.
On the same topics
BlogBanning self-recursive improvement in AI models?Sep 22, 2026
If the top U.S. labs have to give up on what is supposed to be really important, they will look very “catchable.” The policy creates a big incentive for some other parts of the world to invest a lot more in compute.BlogFrontier OverhangsSep 21, 2026
A world with sufficient compute is one where intelligence is a commodity, and in commodity markets margin comes from a superior cost structure, which I would expect the leading model providers to have, in part because they have a meaningful lead in scaling and can apply superior AI to their infrastructure.BlogWhy I still haven't bought into true RSISep 19, 2026
I have my doubts that the labs can afford to spend a constant portion of this compute on internal R&D as the total volume goes up, especially with plans to IPO, as they face increased scrutiny on basic economics.BlogWhy I still haven't bought into true RSISep 19, 2026
It is important to not confuse massive steps in inference-time scaling, a dynamic which should be fairly predictable, with being the outputs of RSI, which is highly uncertain.PodcastDwarkesh Podcast: Agent swarms, alignment, and recursive self-improvementSep 17, 2026
If you have five hours, you’re probably going to do a lot better. The AI models are pretty similar.BlogNo, Anderson Cooper, AI is not going to kill us allSep 10, 2026
But in my view, the net effect of the last decade of “Doomer” talk (Coxon appears to be a card-carrying member of that party) has been to make the Frontier AI companies wealthier and more powerful.
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