At any time of day, any day of the week, you can turn on the TV or radio, or pull up a podcast on your smartphone, or just walk into a coffee shop, and you will likely find yourself within minutes of a conversation about investments in artificial intelligence and the vast infrastructure required to make it work. The reason is obvious: trillions of dollars are expected to be invested in AI infrastructure in the next few years.
The scale of AI investment is so extreme, it almost defies explanation. To say “NVIDIA has a market capitalization of $4.38 trillion” immediately pushes the conversation beyond any human experience of the world. That is enough money to buy 10 million homes valued at more than $400,000, or to build 30,000 new, state-of-the-art hospitals or 88,000 new schools.
There are currently around 6,100 hospitals in the United States, though many counties have none at all. There are roughly 130,000 schools for Kindergarten through 12th Grade. Most could be entirely replaced with far more modern buildings and campuses for the money invested in just one company. Median household income after taxes is $76,000 per year. At that rate, it would take more than 13 million years to accumulate $1 trillion.
Right now, money is chasing AI, because money is chasing AI. Everyone hopes that will result in their money turning into more money. Whether the companies providing this infrastructure and the AI services running on it will ever be able to earn enough from contracts and subscriptions to justify the investment is starting to be called into question.
In 2020, a landmark report estimated that roughly 55% of global economic activity, measured as gross domestic product (GDP)—now equivalent to about $58 trillion—is moderately or highly dependent on natural capital and ecosystm services. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Financial Stability Oversight Council—two important U.S. financial regulators—have both found that unchecked climate change will collapse the financial system and wider economy.
The Food System Economics Commission has found we are currently spending, wasting, or losing through opportunity cost, $15.428 trillion per year from unsustainable food systems and their effects.
We include the three decimal places, because the ’28’ represent $28 billion, which is about 80% of the entire annual budget for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2024. Over 20 years ending in 2024, the agency is estimated to have saved 92 million lives. By that standard, and working in trillions, 0.028 represents enough money to save roughly 3.6 million lives.
While we can compare AI investments and the ecosystem value embedded in our everyday economy, in dollar terms, these questions of value are like comparing printed photographs to time spent with friends and family. If AI does not develop into the dreams of its proponents, life will go on, and the economy might be better off. If Nature collapses, and we cannot access clean water or grow food, millions if not billions of lives will be lost and society will grind to a halt.
Nature is worth a lot more than AI, but we are investing to promote AI and largely ignoring the damage we are doing to Earth’s life-sustaining systems. Misspent trillions do not just constitute dollar-value losses for individual investors. They have the effect of embedding costly waste tthroughout the everyday economy.
In 1972, the community of nations agreed to protect Nature, prevent pollution, and safeguard environmental health. In 1992, three new conventions were added to the body of international law, to prevent dangerous climate change, to protect biodiversity, and to stop desertification. While progress has been made, all of the problems addressed in those treaties are still getting worse.
As embedded costs keep rising and the benefits of natural systems become harder to secure, all areas of human experience are becoming more costly and less secure. This undermines important economic efficiencies that make modern societies work, and sets in motion a competition between technology and humanity.
Mainstream institutions and outdated political thinking have been ineffective at preventing this senseless cost and waste. One does not have to be an expert in any of this to see those failings. It is enough to be forced to intuit, on a daily basis, that the rapidly rising costs of everyday experience are becoming structurally unmanageable.
This is why voters across the United States have suddenly rejected the politics of promoting capital gains over quality of life, human security, and opportunity. The best way to make high-value investments in transformational technology viable—not just as short-term speculation but a real way of building long-term value for society and for investors—is to invest in ways that restore and protect Nature.
We need to stop sacrificing irreplaceable foundational value for a quick hit of financial gains that erode value elsewhere. People want an economy that improves conditions routinely, everywhere, for everyone, and that includes protecting the foundations of all human security and aspiration.
