The Download: AI's trillion-dollar gamble and OpenAI's biology data bid

The Download: AI's trillion-dollar gamble and OpenAI's biology data bid Plus: Nvidia and Meta CEOs have rejected calls for a coordinated AI slowdown. When Jessica Wachter, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to assess AI's impact on the economy over the next few years, she faced a long list of uncertainties. So she started with a "remarkable fact" that is not in question: a handful of so-called hyperscalers are investing huge amounts of money to build AI data centers. Instead of trying to predict how widely deployed AI models will be, Wachter asked how fast the hyperscalers' earnings will need to grow to justify their spending through 2027, when expenditures are expected to reach nearly $1.1 trillion. AI companies will need to achieve an extraordinary increase in productivity just to break even by 2030. Take a closer look at what it will take for the AI buildout to pay off.