# Compute Scarcity Turns Scientific Merit Into Access Politics by Dave Blundin > When frontier compute is scarce enough to be overbid, leased at extraordinary cost, or allocated through privileged relationships, scientific merit no longer determines who can run an experiment. Access politics becomes part of the research method. > **— Adapted from Dave Blundin**, *Moonshots, October 7, 2026* ## Sources and Context - **Recording and precise locator:** [1:07:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRdb8UmPnh0&t=4076s) — *The Fight Over Claude's Consciousness, AI's 1942 Moment, & Why Altman Says "Accept Some Bad Things"*, Moonshots, October 7, 2026. - **Exact reconciled source excerpt:** “We’re just trying to get 72 [GPUs] to do something that we think is very world-changing. The box itself would have cost us $3,500,000 if we’d had the foresight to buy it a year ago. We had one on order for $5,000,000. Somebody overbid us and scooped it. So now our best option is to lease one. For $9,000,000, we can lease it for 3 years, and we don’t even own it at the end of those 3 years.” - **Editorial status:** The poster is explicitly labeled **Adapted from** because it consolidates spoken context into a self-contained proposition. It must not be represented as verbatim speech. Numerical claims, forecasts, legal interpretations, and claims about current organizations remain the speaker’s assertions unless separately verified. - **Reconciled source dossier:** [[research/All Things Superintelligence Research - The Coming Manhattan Project - Moonshots|All Things Superintelligence Research — The Coming Manhattan Project — Moonshots]] preserves broadcast order, speaker attribution, timing, and the source-fidelity boundary. - **Preparation ledger:** [[research/All Things Superintelligence Research - The Coming Manhattan Project - Moonshots - Reminder and Wiki Preparation|Reminder and Wiki Preparation]] records candidate 19, its mechanism, evidence posture, and misreading risks. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/Simple Reminders|Simple Reminders]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] - **Wiki source hub:** [[wiki/Moonshots - The Coming Manhattan Project|Moonshots — The Coming Manhattan Project]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Dave Blundin|Dave Blundin]] - [[wiki/Compute Scarcity|Compute Scarcity]] - [[wiki/Compute Allocation|Compute Allocation]] - [[wiki/NVIDIA NVL72|NVIDIA NVL72]] ## Share on Social Media ``` When frontier compute is scarce enough to be overbid, leased at extraordinary cost, or allocated through privileged relationships, scientific merit no longer determines who can run an experiment. Access politics becomes part of the research method. — Adapted from Dave Blundin, Moonshots, October 7, 2026 https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-dave-blundin-compute-scarcity-turns-scientific-merit-into-access-politics ```