Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · Nov 5, 2026 · 1h 55m · 109m saved
With Dave Blundin, founder and GP of Link Ventures · Salim Ismail, founder of OpenExO and GP of Exponential Venture Capital · Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, computer scientist and founder of Reified
Photo via xprize.org
Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle have now disclosed more than $3 trillion combined in AI leases, buildings, power and equipment — Google's commitment alone is over $1 trillion, nearly eight times last year's figure. Most coverage of that number treats it as a bubble story. Dave Blundin, founder and GP of Link Ventures, argued on Peter Diamandis's Moonshots that the spending is directionally right no matter how the bubble question resolves.
"There's no doubt that it's the right thing for humanity to make this investment at whatever the maximum level humanity can support is." — Dave Blundin
Dave, whose Link Ventures bets on frontier AI and deep tech, joined regular panelists Salim Ismail of Exponential Venture Capital and computer scientist Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross to work through what that spending is already buying: code, weight-editing capability and a new kind of cyberattack.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 1 hour 55 minutes of audio, 6 minutes of reading.
Here are the 6 predictions that matter.
Key Takeaways
Big Tech's AI infrastructure bet is now over $3 trillion, about "10 Apollo programs"
OpenAI reportedly cut its round to $20B from $30B at a $1.25T valuation, down from $1.4T
An "untapped" $9 trillion pool of insurance capital could help finance the build-out
A single GPU cluster lease cost Alexander $15 million for three years
90% of Anthropic's new code is already written by Claude, per its own S-1 filing
Daily code contributions per engineer are 45 times higher than two years ago
MIT researchers got an AI to edit 0.016% of another model's weights and lift its math score from 7.9% to 48.1%
The panel is split on how far the AI self-improvement race can run before a mathematical ceiling sets in
A European refrigeration hack shows cyber offense is now "humans out of the loop"
1. The $3 Trillion AI Bet
Peter opened by laying out the scale of the five biggest AI spenders' commitments, comparing it to the last century's largest government program.
Big Tech's AI spending is now about "10 Apollo programs" worth of commitments
"The entire Apollo program cost about 280 billion in today's dollars. So this is about 10 Apollo programs worth of commitments from five companies." — Peter Diamandis
Dave said the number is justified however the spending plays out, because the payoff being chased is total dominance of the AI race.
"They pull the cash in from all over the world... in just two years, they've completely reversed course to using every penny plus debt... to build out the biggest conceivable AI as quickly as possible." — Dave Blundin
