The Compute Biosphere: The seven-trillion-dollar mistake, and the architecture that succeeds it

Goldman Sachs forecasts seven and a half trillion dollars ofartificial-intelligence capital expenditure between 2026 and 2031.The asset being financed has a service life of three years. Thefinancing has a tenor of one hundred. This is the largest mismatchbetween the duration of a financed asset and the duration of itsfinancing in the recorded economic history of the developed world.It is also, on the analysis of this book, the wrong infrastructure.THE COMPUTE BIOSPHERE is the name the authors give to what comesnext. It is the layered, planet-spanning, multi-substrateintelligence membrane that draws its energy from where energy isfree, conducts its cooling where cooling is free, performs itscomputation on substrates the industrial era of computing did notimagine, and connects through a fabric that no single corporationowns.It is being assembled now — in orbit, on the seafloor, in laboratorydishes in Switzerland and Australia, in foundries in California andNew York, and in the unused processors that already sit in the homesof more than a billion people.ACROSS EIGHT PARTS AND THIRTY-THREE CHAPTERS, the book:— Documents the seven and a half trillion dollar misallocation thatis happening in plain sight, and the depreciation arithmetic thatmakes its correction inevitable— Inventories the seven tiers of the successor architecture:orbital, subsea, biological, photosynthetic, substrate, civilian,federated, and molecular— Dates the four phases of the transition through 2045, keyed tospecific shipping milestones, regulatory events, and capital cycles— Sets out operational playbooks for the chief technology officer,the institutional investor, the sovereign decision-maker, and thecitizen— Costs the build tier by tier, and specifies how every person onEarth becomes a node in the Compute BiosphereEvery claim is anchored to a published paper, a regulatory filing,a deployment that has launched, or a chip that has shipped.The Compute Biosphere will be built. The question is whether itwill be built as a planetary commons, or as a private fortress."A manuscript I wish I had been handed five years ago. It wouldhave changed how I voted. It would have changed how I built."— A senior advisor to the data centre industryNEIL BRAHMAVAR and NIKKI KRISHNAN are the founders of plutonal.aiand the architects of the Omniscient Intelligence framework. Theyare the co-authors of Sentient, the constitutional framework forthe AGI-era enterprise. They write and operate from Sydney. Read more