Davos. The very word evokes a physical reaction—a mix of bile and boredom. It is the annual pilgrimage to the Swiss Alps where the world’s most expensive suits gather to discuss how they might save a planet they are currently strip-mining for relevance. This year’s high priest of the silicon altar is none other than Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, who appeared before the global elite not just as a businessman, but as the architect of our inevitable obsolescence. Huang, clad in his signature black leather jacket—a garment that screams 'I have more GPUs than you have personality'—delivered a message that should, in any sane society, be greeted with a primal scream rather than the polite, tepid applause of the billionaire class.

According to Huang, we are currently witnessing the 'biggest infrastructure buildout in history.' This isn't the kind of infrastructure that benefits the shivering masses, mind you. We aren't talking about bridges that don't collapse, or power grids that don't flicker out during a light breeze, or high-speed rail that isn't a laughingstock. No, we are talking about the foundation for an artificial intelligence system that is evolving faster than our collective ability to understand why we need it. Huang noted that we are already 'a few billion dollars into it,' but that’s just the appetizer. The main course? Trillions. Trillions of dollars in infrastructure yet to be built to support the digital ghost in the machine. It is a staggering sum, a number so large it ceases to have meaning to the average person whose primary concern is whether they can afford eggs and rent in the same month.

To simplify his vision for the room of over-caffeinated oligarchs, Huang described the AI industry as a 'five-layered cake.' It’s a quaint metaphor, the kind one might use to explain a bake sale to a toddler, yet here it is being used to describe the total transformation of human civilization. At the bottom of this cake, Huang places 'energy.' This is the part they usually skip over in the glossy brochures. To power the 'intelligence' that will eventually write our marketing copy and generate pictures of cats in space, we require an ocean of electricity. The irony of discussing this at Davos—a place where people fly private jets to talk about carbon footprints—is so thick you could cut it with one of Huang’s high-end semiconductors. We are building a future of 'clean' energy just so we can burn it all on a server farm that helps a computer guess the next word in a sentence.

Next in the layer cake come the 'chips'—Nvidia’s bread and butter. Then 'cloud infrastructure,' then 'AI models,' and finally, the applications. It is a vertical stack of dependency. We are being told that the only way forward is to invest everything we have into this silicon tower, a monument to the idea that human thought is inefficient and needs to be outsourced to a black box. The Right will undoubtedly see this as a glorious triumph of the market, ignoring the fact that it’s a government-subsidized race to the bottom that further hollows out the middle class. The Left will fret about the 'ethics' and 'bias' of the algorithms, while simultaneously using them to draft their next performative social media post. Both sides are missing the point: we are being sold a trillion-dollar bill for a product that promises to make us irrelevant.

Huang’s 'infrastructure buildout' is essentially a global tax on reality. We are diverting the wealth of nations toward the construction of a digital hallucination. The scale of the vanity is breathtaking. Trillions of dollars to ensure that 'AI models' can better mimic the patterns of human communication, while actual human communication continues to degrade into a series of grunts and tribal slogans. It is the ultimate grift—telling the world that they must rebuild their entire physical and digital existence to accommodate a technology that hasn't even proven it can solve a problem more complex than 'how do I automate my customer service to be more annoying?'

There is a profound, soul-crushing boredom in watching this play out. We are told this is the future, a mandate handed down from the mountain in Davos. We must build the chips, we must burn the energy, we must feed the model. Why? Because the leather jacket said so. Because the 'cake' needs more layers. We are no longer building for ourselves; we are building a world for the AI to live in, hoping it might occasionally drop us a crumb of efficiency from its five-layered feast. It is a spectacular, expensive, and utterly vapid tragedy, and the worst part is that we are all expected to pay for the privilege of our own displacement. The world isn't being reshaped for humanity; it’s being rewired for the shareholders of the silicon age, and Jensen Huang is just the man in the leather jacket handing us the shovel.