The biggest run classified nuclear stockpile loads, at least in the US. They cost about half a billion apiece. And are 30 (carefully cooled and cabled) megawatts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Capitan_(supercomputer)

No chance they're going to take risks to share that hardware with anyone given what it does.

The scaled down version of El Capitan is used for non-classified workloads, some of which are proprietary, like drug simulation. It is called Tuolumne. Not long ago, it was nevertheless still a top ten supercomputer.

Like OP, I also don't see why a government supercomputer does it better than hyperscalers, coreweave, neoclouds, et al, who have put in a ton of capital as even compared to government. For loads where institutional continuity is extremely important, like weather -- and maybe one day, a public LLM model or three -- maybe. But we're not there yet, and there's so much competition in LLM infrastructure that it's quite likely some of these entrants will be bag holders, not a world of juicy margins at all...rather, playing chicken with negative gross margins.

>The big ones are running weather, astronomy simulations, nuclear explosions, biological sequencing, and so on.

these things constitute public goods that benefit the individual regardless of participation.

Many more people materially benefit from e.g. good weather forecasts than form video slop generation.

What's the democratic control of existing resources? I would make the opposite assumption, it would be captured by the wealthiest interests.

Certainly! Your congress representatives would be voting on how to allocate its computing power. (Do you remember who did you vote for last time?)

There are arguments aplenty that schooling and a minimum amount of healthcare are public goods, as are roads built on public land (the government owns most roads after all).

What is the justification for considering data centers capable of running LLMs to be a public good?

There are many counter examples of things many people use but are still private. Clothing stores, restaurants and grocery stores, farms, home appliance factories, cell phone factories, laundromats and more.

Healthcare, schools, roads, generative AI. One of these things is not like the others.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted because you're right. The entire point of taxation is to spread the cost among everyone, and since everyone doesn't utilise every government service every tax payer ends up paying for stuff they don't use. That like, the whole point...

Huh, TIL - thanks for the correction.

https://www.ornl.gov/news/doe-incite-program-seeks-2026-prop...

> The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program has announced the 2026 Call for Proposals, inviting researchers to apply for access to some of the world’s most powerful high-performance computing systems.

> The proposal submission window runs from April 11 to June 16, 2025, offering an opportunity for scientific teams to secure substantial computational resources for large-scale research projects in fields such as scientific modeling, simulation, data analytics and artificial intelligence. [...]

> Individual awards typically range from 500,000 to 1,000,000 node-hours on Aurora and Frontier and 100,000 to 250,000 node-hours on Polaris, with the possibility of larger allocations for exceptional proposals. [...]

> The selection process involves a rigorous peer review, assessing both scientific merit and computational readiness. Awards will be announced in November 2025, with access to resources beginning in 2026.

Not sure OpenAI/Anthropic etc would be OK with a six month gap between application and getting access to the resources, but this does indeed demonstrate that government issued super-computing resources is a previously solved problem.

you'll never win that argument, but I absolutely agree.

people have no idea about how big the military and defense budgets worldwide are next to any other example of a public budget.

throw as many pie charts out as you want; people just can't see the astronomical difference in budgets.

I think it's based on how the thing works; a good defense works until it doesn't -- the other systems/budgets in place have a bit more of a graceful failure. This concept produces an irrationality in people that produces windfalls of cash availability.

should the government own all types of "public services"? e.g. search index, video serving infra, etc?

I'm not sure how that's relevant here.

Cool. Time for the government to seize Amazon.