The concepts of industrial reserve capacity and using dual-use consumer goods to subsidize military production capacity are well known and widely practiced historically in the US. China adopted this strategy from the US, and the US conveniently forgot about it for a few decades in order to justify selling off the industrial base to China, but at least based on public documents like the published U.S. National Security Strategy, I would assess with high probability that this is explicitly recognized and being followed now.
AI is not fake and it does work, but what I am saying is that from a pure systemic analysis perspective, you can do the numbers, and even if AI was complete fugazi, the benefits you get from the electrical generation capacity, and the ability to fund it through private markets, which bypasses Congress, and locks in commercial contracts (often with foreign governments) which will be almost impossible politically to reverse, would still make it optimal from a strategic perspective. That is my calculation, and to the extent that it is correct, I would assume that the US Military's strategic planning apparatus would arrive at the same conclusion.
AI compute has some unique characteristics that make it especially useful for grid management. Moving consumer compute to the cloud means that the electrical use of that compute can be centrally managed. In an emergency, you can cut electrical use for consumer AI by 50% or more, because chips run more efficiently at lower power, and you can shift workloads onto quantized models, reduce resolution for video output, etc, to reduce compute, which leads to minor service degradation but not interruption. AI datacenters are also adding massive amounts of battery storage capacity, which is an additional grid buffer. For every GW in capacity added by hyperscalers that is creating a dispatchable reserve capacity of 50% under completely normal circumstances (hyperscalers do this internally to optimize their own costs) and then that number goes up depending on the scale and duration of the emergency.
alt Hacker News
The concepts of industrial reserve capacity and using dual-use consumer goods to subsidize military production capacity are well known and widely practiced historically in the US. China adopted this strategy from the US, and the US conveniently forgot about it for a few decades in order to justify selling off the industrial base to China, but at least based on public documents like the published U.S. National Security Strategy, I would assess with high probability that this is explicitly recognized and being followed now.
AI is not fake and it does work, but what I am saying is that from a pure systemic analysis perspective, you can do the numbers, and even if AI was complete fugazi, the benefits you get from the electrical generation capacity, and the ability to fund it through private markets, which bypasses Congress, and locks in commercial contracts (often with foreign governments) which will be almost impossible politically to reverse, would still make it optimal from a strategic perspective. That is my calculation, and to the extent that it is correct, I would assume that the US Military's strategic planning apparatus would arrive at the same conclusion.
AI compute has some unique characteristics that make it especially useful for grid management. Moving consumer compute to the cloud means that the electrical use of that compute can be centrally managed. In an emergency, you can cut electrical use for consumer AI by 50% or more, because chips run more efficiently at lower power, and you can shift workloads onto quantized models, reduce resolution for video output, etc, to reduce compute, which leads to minor service degradation but not interruption. AI datacenters are also adding massive amounts of battery storage capacity, which is an additional grid buffer. For every GW in capacity added by hyperscalers that is creating a dispatchable reserve capacity of 50% under completely normal circumstances (hyperscalers do this internally to optimize their own costs) and then that number goes up depending on the scale and duration of the emergency.