A huge investment in computers

On the size of 3M, updates to the electrical grid, and an announcement from Microsoft of extraordinary size

Microsoft is planning to spend $80 billion on data centers before the end of the fiscal year -- an amount that ought to make people sit up and take notice. As an infrastructure project, it's huge.

■ $80 billion is more than the $65 billion in electrical grid upgrades promised by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. It's comparable in scale to one of our biggest industries -- roughly the value of net aerospace exports from the US.

■ It's more than the market capitalizations of businesses that are household names, like Ferrari, US Bank, Marriott, BP, or 3M. Most notably, $80 billion is more than the gross domestic products of at least seven states.

■ But Microsoft says it "is on track to invest approximately $80 billion to build out AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world". AI is the subject of immense hype and enormous amounts of overstatement. But $80 billion is an extraordinary amount of real money.

■ If the figures are true (and as a publicly traded company, Microsoft is subject to reporting requirements that will bear them out), it's an investment -- or perhaps a speculation -- of historic proportions.

They don’t look like much from the outside, but there’s a lot going on inside