Dwarkesh Patel Hosts the Dwarkesh Podcast, a long-form interview show on AI progress, timelines, and the people building frontier models, along with economists and historians.

“Very plausibly, incremental capex every year is getting close to $10 trillion by the end of the decade. That's going to be close to a tenth of the world economy, and if it's all happening in the US, a third to a quarter of the US economy would just be going toward data centers. As I say that out loud, I'm like — maybe you're right and we just won't allow it, and that's the reason this doesn't happen.”

Dwarkesh Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · August 2026

Working through Patel's capex projections out loud and arriving at a conclusion he didn't start with: that the binding constraint may be political rather than technical or financial. The self-interruption is the interesting part — he talks himself into the objection mid-sentence. Patel's reply is that he believes in reallocation toward the most profitable thing, but concedes the politics.

Dwarkesh Podcast · 2026-08-25 Listen to the episode → More from Dwarkesh Patel → More AI Research & Frontier Labs quotes →

Transcript

Dwarkesh Podcast

Speaker 1

Right. So very plausibly, incremental capex every year is getting close to $10 trillion.

Dylan Patel

By the end of the decade.

Speaker 1

Right, which is going to be like close to a tenth of the world economy and like a third of, if all of it's going up in the US, it's like, well, the U.S. economy will have grown as well, but still at the current size of the US economy, it'll be like a third to a quarter of the US economy would just be going towards data centers. And as I say that out loud, I'm like, maybe you're right and we just won't allow it. And that's the reason this doesn't happen, right? Because for this exponential continue, just like a quarter of the world, a quarter of America's economy is just building data centers.

Dylan Patel

Yeah, I mean, I believe in capitalism and reallocation of resources towards the most profitable thing, but at the same time, politics exist. Yeah, yeah. And credit markets exist and capital markets exist. So. To enable, let's say, that 100 gigawatts by 2030, or let's even like pare it down to 2028…

Speaker 1

Antithesis is a deterministic software testing platform that enables perfect reproducibility. It also unlocks some pretty insane approaches to debugging, like time travel. With Antithesis, you can jump to any point in a trajectory and start from there. So when there's a crash, you can rewind to the…

Speaker 4

a fucking problem, dude. Can't believe it.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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