'These Kids Today' Will Be the Richest Grownups Ever

Who knew Kylie Jenner had such a mind for business? The question asked is not meant as an insult. Quite the opposite.

Jenner is a reminder of why “these kids today” eventually evolve into prosperous adults. Having interacted with technology in ways their elders never did, they see it differently.

Applied to Jenner, adults saw the social media on which she interacted to the tune of millions of followers as – yes – the stuff of “these kids today.” To Jenner, those millions of followers were her marketing strategy.

As Forbes eventually reported alongside the maturation of Kylie Lip Kits into a corporation called Kylie Cosmetics, Jenner was able to create a billion-dollar business with six full-time employees and six part-time employees. See her social media following to develop a partial understanding of why Kylie Cosmetics could grow so quickly on the relative cheap.

Except there was more. As readers can almost certainly guess from the flat, and diminutive organizational structure, myriad functions of the business including product creation were outsourced.

The ascent of what is now so much more than Kylie Cosmetics is useful to think about amid the proliferation of data centers. Seemingly supporters of same wrap it in excitement about reduced latency following questions asked. Critics seemingly look at data centers as excessive consumers of water and energy that will eventually render the cost of both – and living more broadly – a great deal more expensive.

Both sides miss the point. For those who treasure reduced latency as they search for the best chicken fried steak in Bethesda, the abundant information creation powered by data centers is a certain benefit of their growth, but not the purpose. Data centers are too costly to just be about quick information for everyone.

Which explains why the critics are wrong too as they make Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, and smartphone usage about data center energy consumption. In truth, these monuments to the future are the embodiment of worker freedom from the limiting technology of the past. Translated, it didn’t do nearly enough work for us. By beautiful contrast, data centers represent staggering amounts of work done for us.

Their energy consumption doesn’t just free us humans from all sorts of toil that we formerly couldn’t avoid, and that rendered us much less valuable for not being able to avoid it, they most excitingly represent the automation of endless amounts of effort that formerly required endless amounts of people. See Jenner again.

Better yet, see those quite a bit younger than the 29-year-old Jenner. Having seen and interacted with technology in ways that would be “another country” relative to the young billionaire, they’ll utilize it in ways she never imagined.

Those interactions will prove more valuable than traditional education exactly because it’s opening their eyes to human possibilities in a world where machines can literally do what thousands of humans were once required to do. Here lies the genius of data centers.

Though the energy they consume in aggregate may seem enormous, the energy they will create on the path to herculean production will render the consumption microscopic by comparison. Just as Jenner required no business training or evident business skills to prosper, the billionaires and trillionaires of the future will require even less.

The only limit to human progress has always been the number of hands and machines we could divide up work with. Looking ahead, we will literally have tens of thousands of hands at our individual disposal. That’s what data centers are for, and that’s why “these kids today” will soon enough be the richest grownups the world has ever known.

Originally published on Real Clear Markets.