To paraphrase Milton Friedman: There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. You can spend your own money on somebody else. You can spend somebody else’s money on yourself. Finally, you can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else.
Spending your own money (whether on yourself or on someone else) means you will care about it. But, when you spend somebody else’s money, especially on somebody else, you don’t care how much you spend or what you get for it.
We were reminded of this recently when reading the news. Google and Amazon inked what are likely multiple-billion-dollar deals with power companies to build small scale, modular nuclear reactors. At the same time, Microsoft has agreed to pay for the revival of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
Why? Because they want to power their own insatiable needs for electricity that will come from data centers to support generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). Solar and Wind won’t get the job done because they are intermittent power sources. To efficiently run an AI data center they need non-stop, reliable, 24/7 electricity. For green energy, that’s nuclear!
What’s so amazing about this is that the Green New Deal movement shunned nuclear power. California, Michigan, and Germany have all closed nuclear plants in a single-minded mission to only use solar and wind. We assume they believe using natural things, like sunlight and wind is better than using man-made things, like nuclear energy. Otherwise, these decisions make no sense.
But isn’t that what spending other people’s money is all about? You don’t have to care about how it is spent. And boy did they spend.
