Nice Question

  fun and useful to run the numbers. I’ll make clear assumptions, show a few scenarios, and flag the big caveats.

Key facts I’ll use (sourced): global data-center capital expenditure in 2024 was reported at about $455 billion. Dell Oro Group
U.S. data centers consumed roughly 176 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2023 (useful for an energy comparison). Environmental and Energy Study Institute+1

Money → how many people you could hire

Assumption: “hire” = pay a person a total annual compensation package (salary + benefits) of X dollars. Real hiring costs vary wildly by country and role, so I give three common benchmarks.

Using $455 billion total:

• At $50,000/year per person → ≈ 9.10 million people.
  Calculation: 455,000,000,000 / 50,000 = 9,100,000.

• At $75,000/year per person → ≈ 6.07 million people.
  Calculation: 455,000,000,000 / 75,000 = 6,066,667.

• At $100,000/year per person → ≈ 4.55 million people.
  Calculation: 455,000,000,000 / 100,000 = 4,550,000.

Caveats (money version): those totals ignore hiring friction (recruiting, payroll taxes, office costs), geographic differences in cost of living, and that some of the data-center money is physical capital (buildings, servers) not strictly salaries — but as a back-of-envelope reallocation from capex to payroll, those are the raw headcount numbers.

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Energy → how many 40-watt “meat computers” you could run

Interpretation: you earlier used “40 watts” as the brain’s continuous power draw. Let’s compare electricity used by data centers to the electrical equivalent of a 40 W continuous load.

• 40 W continuous = 0.04 kW → per year = 0.04 kW × 24 hr × 365 ≈ 350.4 kWh/year per brain.

• Using U.S. data-center electricity = 176 TWh/year = 176,000,000,000 kWh/year:

  Number of 40 W brains = 176,000,000,000 kWh ÷ 350.4 kWh ≈ ≈ 502 million brains.

So — purely on electricity terms — the U.S. data-center electricity alone could sustain the electrical-equivalent consumption of roughly half a billion 40-W brains. (If you used global data-center electricity the number would be larger.)

Important caveat (energy version): human brains are powered metabolically by food, not primarily by plugged-in electricity. Converting food energy to an “electric equivalent” is messy and not the same as powering a server farm with the grid. Also data centers require cooling, redundancy, and infrastructure that humans don’t — and humans need housing, healthcare, etc. So the “502 million” figure is a provocative electricity comparison, not a literal policy plan.

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Bottom line / takeaway

• If you reallocated ~$455B of 2024 data-center capex to hiring, you’d pay between ~4.6M and ~9.1M people (depending on per-person pay assumptions). Dell Oro Group

• If you instead compare electricity, the U.S. data-center load could power the electric equivalent of roughly 500 million 40-watt brains for a year — a striking illustration of scale. Environmental and Energy Study Institute+1

Want me to:

• run the same money calculation with a different capex figure (some sources cite ~$430–600B for 2024–25), or

• convert the “brain powered by food” angle into calories/day and estimate global food/energy tradeoffs?

You said:

so it would be twice as large as the current lagest employer

ChatGPT said:

Yes — that checks out, depending on the assumptions.

Using the Dell’Oro estimate that global data-center capex was about $455 billion in 2024, reallocating that money to pay people would produce different headcounts depending on annual pay. Dell Oro Group

Using simple per-person pay benchmarks:

• $100,000/year → ~4.55 million hires (≈ 2.17× Walmart’s ~2.1 million employees).

• $75,000/year → ~6.07 million hires (≈ 2.9× Walmart).

• $50,000/year → ~9.10 million hires (≈ 4.3× Walmart).

Walmart’s global workforce is roughly 2.1 million people, so the $455B→payroll reallocation at the $100k/person assumption would indeed be a little more than twice the size of today’s largest employer. Walmart Corporate News and Information+1

(As before: these are back-of-envelope comparisons — capex is not the same as annual payroll dollars, and real-world costs for hiring include taxes, benefits, facilities, and ongoing operating costs. But as a thought experiment, the scale is striking.)

Gray vs. Green: Cleveland's $3 Billion Stormwater Choice

October 04, 2025

A shadow analysis examining what Cleveland could have built with distributed green infrastructure instead of centralized tunnel systems.

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The Gray Infrastructure Decision

Cleveland's Project Clean Lake represents a massive bet on centralized "gray" infrastructure: deep storage tunnels to capture stormwater overflow. The project cost is $3 billion, completing in 2036.

What was built:

• Multiple deep storage tunnels (200+ feet underground)
• Doan Valley Tunnel: $142.3 million
• Big Creek Tunnel: $260 million (estimated)
• Westerly Tunnel: $220 million (estimated)
• Additional tunnels and pump stations completing through 2036

The rationale: Capture 98% of combined sewer overflow, reduce pollution to Lake Erie.

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The Green Infrastructure Alternative: What $3 Billion Could Build

Scenario 1: New Homes with Rain Gardens

Assumption: Build modest new homes with integrated stormwater management on each property.

Using Cleveland construction costs and rain garden installation:

• Modest new home: ~$250,000 (1,600 sq ft @ $156/sq ft average)
• Rain garden per home: ~$2,000 (400 sq ft @ $5/sq ft DIY-installed)
• Total per household: ~$252,000

What $3 billion buys:

• 11,905 complete new homes with rain gardens
• Each home captures ~1,000 gallons of stormwater per rain event
• Total distributed capacity: ~11.9 million gallons per storm event
• Creates 11,905 new housing units in a city struggling with vacancy and affordable housing

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Scenario 2: Retrofit Existing Homes with Rain Gardens

Assumption: Install professionally-designed rain gardens at existing homes across Cleveland's residential areas.

Using professional installation costs:

• Rain garden installation: ~$4,000 per home (400 sq ft @ $10/sq ft professional)
• Additional grading, native plants, soil amendment included

What $3 billion buys:

• 750,000 homes retrofitted with rain gardens
• Cleveland has roughly 175,000 residential parcels — this could cover every single home more than 4 times over
• Or: every home in Cleveland + surrounding Cuyahoga County suburbs (~500,000 homes total) with budget remaining
• Total distributed stormwater capture: ~750 billion gallons capacity per event (theoretical maximum)

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Scenario 3: Mixed Strategy — Housing + Green Infrastructure

Assumption: Balance new construction with existing home retrofits.

Using $3 billion split:

• $1.5 billion: Build 5,952 new affordable homes with rain gardens
• $1.5 billion: Retrofit 375,000 existing homes with rain gardens

Result:

• Nearly 6,000 new housing units
• Green stormwater management for ~375,000 existing homes (more than double Cleveland's housing stock)
• Distributed system resilient to single-point failures
• Creates construction jobs distributed across neighborhoods
• Addresses housing crisis while solving stormwater issues

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The Comparison: Distributed vs. Centralized

Factor	Gray Infrastructure (Tunnels)	Green Infrastructure (Rain Gardens + Homes)
Jobs created	Concentrated (tunnel boring, engineering)	Distributed (construction, landscaping, maintenance)
Asset created	Single-purpose (stormwater only)	Multi-purpose (housing + stormwater + green space)
Maintenance	High-cost specialized systems	Lower-cost distributed maintenance
Resilience	Single-point failure risk	Distributed system (thousands of small solutions)
Community benefit	Invisible infrastructure	Visible housing, property values, neighborhood greening
Climate adaptation	Fixed capacity	Scalable, adaptable over time
Local economy	Mega-contracts to large firms	Distributed to local contractors, landscapers, nurseries
Lifespan	50-100 years (then replacement)	20+ years rain gardens; permanent housing

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The Environmental Mirror

This choice mirrors the data center analysis exactly:

Data Centers: Instead of hiring ~4.5 to 9 million people, we built concentrated silicon "thinking" capacity in centralized facilities.

Stormwater: Instead of building ~12,000 homes (or retrofitting 750,000) with distributed green infrastructure, Cleveland built concentrated underground storage capacity in centralized tunnels.

Both represent the same philosophical choice: centralized, technological, single-purpose infrastructure over distributed, multi-benefit, human-scale solutions.

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The Long-Run Implications

Why this might be a "super bad decision":

1. Missed housing opportunity: Cleveland has significant housing vacancy and affordability challenges. 12,000 new homes would revitalize neighborhoods.

2. Vulnerability: A single tunnel system represents concentrated risk. Distributed rain gardens create redundancy — if 10% fail, you lose 10% capacity, not everything.

3. Maintenance burden: Future Cleveland residents inherit specialized tunnel infrastructure requiring expert maintenance. Rain gardens can be maintained by homeowners.

4. Lost co-benefits: Rain gardens provide green space, reduce urban heat island effects, improve property values, create habitat. Tunnels provide only stormwater storage.

5. Economic concentration: $3 billion to a few large engineering firms vs. distributed across thousands of local contractors, landscapers, and construction workers.

6. Climate maladaptation: As rainfall patterns intensify, you can't easily expand tunnel capacity. You can add more rain gardens.

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Bottom Line

What was chosen: $3 billion for invisible infrastructure that solves one problem (combined sewer overflow).

What could have been built:

• 11,905 complete new homes with rain gardens, OR
• 750,000 existing homes retrofitted (4× Cleveland's entire housing stock), OR
• 6,000 new homes + 375,000 retrofits

The tunnel approach solves the immediate regulatory problem (EPA consent decree). The distributed approach would have solved multiple intersecting crises: stormwater, housing, vacancy, neighborhood decline, climate adaptation.

The parallel is exact: Just as data center capex could employ millions of people, Cleveland's stormwater budget could have housed thousands or greened hundreds of thousands of properties — but we chose the concentrated, technological solution over the distributed, human-scale one.

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Sources: Project Clean Lake cost from Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District; Cleveland construction costs from multiple regional sources (2024-2025); rain garden installation costs from City of Chicago, Rain Garden Alliance, and EPA Low Impact Development studies.