> A majority of the generation will come from large GE Vernova (NYSE: GEV) turbines.

But, there's another way to see this: if you pay someone money, you end up with a lot of say in what they can or can't do. That money does not come with any guarantee; the party offering the money will keep the money flowing based on their own perception of good behavior of the party receiving the money. The post-Trump administrations will find themselves in the possession of a tremendous amount of leverage with Iran.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Iran#Main_f...

[1] https://www.globaldatacenterhub.com/p/can-elon-musks-7b-colo...

Ok. And why does it follow from this that the physics of an orbital data center makes no sense?

But one or two years from now, many more people will have learned how to be productive with AI. Knowledge will percolate.

And for all those people, the companies will ask themselves: is this guy's 20% increase in productivity worth $200 per month? If that increase in productivity is actually worth $2000 per month, then the answer will be an unequivocal yes. Not only that, but the need to switch to lower cost AI providers, so the $200 is lowered to $20 will just not be worth the extra headache of having to go through all the approvals to onboard a new vendor.

That is the Copilot's moat.

Most businesses don't have the GPUs, or the knowledge necessary to do self-hosted inference. So, they'd have to rely on OpenRouter, or Ollama, or some other inference provider, but there are lots of problems with that. With Microsoft, people could get comfortable with the compliance side of the problem. They already use Outlook, and Office365. Copilot is just one more point where things can go wrong, but it's less scary than your emails being captured and held for ransom, and you already think Microsoft can take care of that. But with Ollama or OpenRouter, you have no idea what is happening with your data, and you also are not sure if they are serving the real models, or quantized versions.

To be sure, there will be plenty of people finding alternate solutions, but 80-90% of the businesses will just pay the higher price to Microsoft.

We will hear projections soon, in a few months, but my guess is that the big 3 (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) will get of the order of $10 billion per month in AI inference revenues. And it will only go up from there.

1. Why it's not a bold assumption: it's a bit shocking now. But in two years or so, many/most companies will realize this is the cost of doing business. Just like people are ok with using Outlook, or Office 365, or (in the case of Wall Street) Bloomberg terminals, people will realize that developers will need AI coding assistants.

2. Why the conclusion does not follow from the assumption: if the limit is set at $1500/developer/month, it does not mean all developers will use it. Companies will set incentives for people to not be very wasteful. It is more likely that on average developers will consume $100-200 worth of tokens per month, and there will be some outliers who will consume 10, 100, or 1000 times as much, but they'll be few.

Maybe I'm squinting too hard, but it seems to me you are talking about Musk here. We are not allocating any resources to him. He took some risks, started some ventures, some failed, but some succeeded spectacularly. He made lots of people wealthy in the process. I own a few shares of Tesla and they appreciated since I bought them. I did not become rich, but I did benefit from Musk's activities, and millions other people did. The society did not "allocate resources to Musk", and society did not "allocate resources" to J.P. Morgan or to Rockefeller or to Ford or to Bezos.

It feels to me you are asking "why can't we just eliminate billionaires". Well, they have a vote in that decision.