It's unfair, because we are talking in the hindsight about everything but Project Stargate, and it's also just your list (and I don't know what others could add to it) but it got me thinking. Manhattan Project goal is to make a powerful bomb. Apollo is to get to the Moon before soviets do (so, because of hubris, but still there is a concrete goal). South-North Water Transfer is pretty much terraforming, and others are mostly roads. I mean, it's all kinda understandable.

And Stargate Project is... what exactly? What is the goal? To make Altman richer, or is there any more or less concrete goal to achieve?

Also, few items for comparison, that I googled while thinking about it:

- Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository: $96B

- ITER: $65B

- Hubble Space Telescope: $16B

- JWST: $11B

- LHC: $10B

Sources:

https://jameswebbtracker.com/jwst/budget

https://blogfusion.tech/worlds-most-expensive-experiments/

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/overview/faqs/

Those are all public projects except for one..

Also note compute deprecates much faster than multi decade infra projects with chance of obsolecence. If deepseek keeps pace with releasing near SOTA models, those compute centres are going to have hard time recooping value / return on capital.

Is this inflation adjusted?

Building a lot of compute will likely end up more useful than Apollo & ISS, which were vanity projects.

Neom: $1.5T