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casey newton

Let me ask you this. Settle a bet. What do you think is a better name for a golden retriever, Bubbles or Potato?

kevin roose

Uh, male or female?

casey newton

Female.

kevin roose

Um, Bubbles.

casey newton

That’s what I said. So my brother and his family are getting a new dog, and they sent me pictures of this golden retriever. And my nephew said, we’re thinking Bubbles or Potato. And I said, well, I think it has to be Bubbles because dogs want a nickname.

kevin roose

Yes.

casey newton

And if it’s Bubbles then it’s Bubs, it’s Bubba —

kevin roose

Sir Bubs a Lot.

casey newton

— Sir Bubs a Lot.

kevin roose

Yes.

casey newton

You can imagine.

kevin roose

We could go on. Yes.

casey newton

If it’s Potato it’s what, Tate?

kevin roose

Tater?

casey newton

Tato? Tater?

kevin roose

Popo?

casey newton

Popo? I wouldn’t call it that.

kevin roose

That one’s taken. Yeah.

casey newton

I lost, and so now the dog is named Potato.

kevin roose

No, come on.

casey newton

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

kevin roose

We got to change this. It’s not too late.

casey newton

It might be too late.

kevin roose

[LAUGHS]: Well, the dog doesn’t care.

casey newton

That’s probably true.

kevin roose

Yeah.

casey newton

Potato is just a puppy. So my dad saw a picture and he said, it’s really more like a French fry at this point, and I thought that was cute.

kevin roose

[LAUGHS]: That is such a good dad joke.

casey newton

Right? [THEME MUSIC]

kevin roose

I’m Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at “The New York Times.”

casey newton

I’m Casey Newton from Platformer. And this is “Hard Fork!” This week, an eye popping deal between OpenAI and NVIDIA has us asking, is this AI boom turning into a bubble? Then the chaos over visas — immigration expert Jeremy Neufeld joins us to explain how Trump’s new $100,000 visa fee could hurt the economy. And finally, the rapture that wasn’t. I explain to Kevin how TikTok went wild for the end of days. Heaven help us.

kevin roose

Well, Casey, it’s time to put on our work boots and roll up our sleeves. Because today we’re talking about the great AI build out.

casey newton

Oh, I thought you were going to say we were joining the Village People.

kevin roose

[LAUGHS]: No. So this week, we got some news that I think is thematically related to what I have started calling the great build out. This is our big national infrastructure project to build all of the data centers, and acquire all of the compute, and make all of the investments that are necessary for the next phase of AI development. So on Monday, NVIDIA and OpenAI announced that they had struck a $100 billion deal. This deal will be an investment that NVIDIA is making in OpenAI, $10 billion at a time, until the full $100 billion is reached. NVIDIA is giving OpenAI cash and getting equity in return. This is designed to help OpenAI build out massive new data centers that will run on NVIDIA’s AI chips.

casey newton

Yeah. And just to put that number in perspective, if I walked into a bank right now and said, can I have $100 billion, they would say, no.

kevin roose

I don’t know. I hear the newsletter business is very lucrative. So that was announcement number one is this new NVIDIA-OpenAI deal. And then on Tuesday we got announcement number two, which was that OpenAI has announced five new sites for Stargate, their huge infrastructure effort. They said that they were developing two new sites with Oracle in Shackelford County, Texas, and Dona Ana County in New Mexico, along with a third site in an undisclosed location in the Midwest. They are also developing two additional Stargate sites in partnership with SoftBank, and those sites will be located in Lordstown, Ohio, and Milam County, Texas. Altogether, these new sites will bring Stargate to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity, and over $400 billion in investment over the next three years. So today, we’ll talk about some of this new infrastructure news and what it means for the direction that AI is heading — just the vast, unprecedented scale of the investments that are being made in AI right now. And then we’ll talk about the kind of strangeness surrounding these various deals and why we are seeing the biggest companies racing forward, no plans of slowing down, and what it means for the future. And before we do that, I think we should make our AI disclosures.

casey newton

Sir, what’s yours?

kevin roose

Mine is that “The New York Times” company is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright violations.

casey newton

And my boyfriend works at Anthropic.

kevin roose

OK. So Casey, that’s a lot of big numbers that I just threw at you and threw at our listeners. So maybe we should, before we talk about what this means, just give some context for the scale that we’re talking about here.

casey newton

Yeah. So one number that I would throw out is 71.4 billion, which is the amount of money that OpenAI had raised before this week. Right? So in the entire history of the company, they had only made it to $71.4 billion. And now along comes NVIDIA and, in one fell swoop, promises to eventually invest more than OpenAI has invested to this point. So we’ve already been at a point where people are saying, mm, I don’t know. Sure seems like these companies have raised a lot of money, and they’re not profitable, and everything they do is incredibly expensive. And yet, instead of moderating at all, these companies are stepping on the gas pedal.

kevin roose

Yeah. I mean, the comparison I’ve been trying to use to illustrate the scale of investment that’s happening now is with the interstate highway system, which was built over a 36-year period at a cost of roughly $300 billion, adjusted for inflation. That’s today’s dollars. On a recent earnings call, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, estimated that this year alone, US companies would spend about $600 billion on AI data centers. So in other words, this year, the AI industry is projecting to spend basically twice as much as the cost of the entire interstate highway system in one year.

casey newton

It’s almost like they’re building an information superhighway system.

kevin roose

[LAUGHS]: Get out of here.

casey newton

All right.

kevin roose

So that’s one comparison that, for me at least, helped drive home the scale of this. Are there any comparisons that have been helping you drive home the scale of this?

casey newton

Yeah. So I decided to do a little research. I wanted to try to reach our Gen Z listeners, because we have a lot of Gen Z listeners. And so I tried to estimate how much would it cost to build one Labubu factory. Because Labubus are very hot, right? Everybody is trying to get their hands on one of these things.

kevin roose

Yeah.

casey newton

So according to the estimates that I was able to put together, if you were to build a new Labubu factory from scratch, it would cost you between $15 and $20 million. So that means that, Kevin, for this $100 billion that NVIDIA may now invest in OpenAI, they could have built 5,000 Labubu factories.

kevin roose

Wow.

casey newton

So I hope that puts that into perspective for folks.

kevin roose

Yeah. I can’t believe the Trump administration is not making domestic Labubu production an urgent infrastructure priority.

casey newton

It’s really my number one issue with the Trump administration.

kevin roose

[LAUGHS]: So, obviously, th