It wasn't, but we're comparing to the yearly budget of Manhattan/Apollo (as a fraction of GDP). NASA budget was between 0.3-0.9% of GDP in 1963-1970[0], that was per year. In 1965 GDP was $743B (nominal), so 0.5% of that is ~4B, and the (nominal) cost of Apollo (which wasn't the whole NASA budget) was 25B.
As aa part of GDP from 1970 (1.073T) the total cost of Apollo would be like 4% of that single year's GDP. Not a good comparison because when Apollo started GDP was 563B and was 1.3T when it ended.
Yann is not a CFO. If I buy a house tomorrow, I don't just consider it a massive one-day expense. They will amortize the cost over the useful life of the hardware.
Meta's 2023 electricity usage was 11.5 terawatt-hours [1]. They've historically added about two terawatt-hours per year. That's only 228 MW of additional capacity per year.
Sure, but in every historical year they are also trying not to increase energy use, for cost reasons -- they have not been build-out limited. I don't think adding an additional 150% of historical average is especially challenging (beyond the huge OpEx expenditure, which isn't a problem for Meta).
- There's no way Meta is paying retail.