Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt says AI may hit a money wall before it hits a power wall. Everyone is talking about energy constraints. Schmidt thinks they're focused on the wrong bottleneck. Here's the math he laid out: Roughly $50 billion per gigawatt of AI compute. 10 gigawatts of capacity costs half a trillion dollars. To seriously scale the infrastructure this industry needs, you are talking about deploying a trillion dollars or more into a single sector. "How many companies, countries, and so forth can hand an industry a trillion dollars of capital? Very, very few." China could do it. He's not sure if they are but they have the state capacity to try. Europe can't. Their capital markets aren't built for it. America can. And that's the edge. The brilliance of US capital markets is the ability to borrow and deploy that kind of money faster than any other system in the world. That structural advantage is what allows the AI buildout to happen here at a scale that other countries simply cannot match. "The Europeans can't do this, which they're sort of sore about. But this is good for America."