Meet the Compute Barons

The Dukes of Westminster. The Grosvenor family came by its London land through marriage. In 1677 Sir Thomas Grosvenor married the heiress Mary Davies, and with her came about 500 acres west of the City, including the “Hundred Acres” that became Mayfair. The Survey of London calls the family “the richest urban landlords in the country.” The dukedom came in 1874, and the estate is still held by the Grosvenor trustees.³ Today the core is a roughly 300-acre estate in Mayfair and Belgravia.⁴

The Grosvenors built handsome streets, and they managed them with care. But the chokepoint was the ground itself. Nobody can make more Mayfair, and as London grew, the ground rent grew with it. George used this duke as his chief example. “To take all his ground rents by taxation would largely reduce his enormous income, but would still leave him his buildings and all the income from them.”⁵

The Astors. John Jacob Astor made his first money in furs and his lasting money in Manhattan land. He left a fortune variously estimated at $20 million to $30 million when he died in 1848, and his son William B. Astor became “sometimes known as the ‘Landlord of New York.’”⁶ In 1834 he placed 125 parcels of Manhattan real estate in what is believed to be America’s first family trust.⁷ The Astors did not need to build much. The city grew around them, and the value of their lots rose with every new arrival. George’s reply was that “the puniest infant that comes wailing into the world in the squalidest room of the most miserable tenement house, becomes at that moment seized of an equal right with the millionaires.”⁸

Leland Stanford. Stanford co-founded the Central Pacific and became its president in 1861. He was governor of California from January 1862 to December 1863, and while in office he approved public grants, one of which aided the Central Pacific, a railroad in which he had a personal interest.⁹ The Pacific Railway Act was signed on July 1, 1862, and in the National Archives’ summary, Congress eventually authorized four transcontinental railroads and granted 174 million acres of public lands.¹⁰ An 1881 federal audit found that the Central Pacific was entitled to 20 sections, or 12,800 acres, for each mile of road, along with $25,517,000 in United States bonds.¹¹ George saw the same pattern in California, where so much land “is covered by railroad grants” or “monopolized by locations which command the water” that “appropriation has got ahead of the settler.”¹²

Stanford also gave much of his fortune away. He and his wife founded Stanford University in 1885 on their 8,180-acre stock farm, and it opened in 1891.¹³

Cornelius Vanderbilt. The phrase “robber baron” was first aimed at him, and in an odd way. In 1859 Henry J. Raymond of the New York Times compared him to “those old German barons” who “wrung tribute from every passenger that floated by,” because Pacific Mail was paying him to stay off its route. The historian T. J. Stiles points out that Raymond’s complaint was that Vanderbilt was a competitor of monopolists, almost the opposite of the modern meaning. Vanderbilt later took the Hudson River Railroad in 1864, which gave him a monopoly on the railways into Manhattan, and seized the New York Central in January 1867.¹⁴ Stiles also notes that he and his peers “radically lowered prices,” and that “no evidence has convincingly demonstrated that he corrupted government officials.” The most famous line tied to the family, “The public be damned,” was said by his son William H. Vanderbilt on October 8, 1882, and one account holds it was a brush-off to a reporter during dinner. I treat it as disputed in spirit, if not in words.¹⁵

Jay Gould. Gould was a director of the Erie Railway during the 1868 Erie War, when, as Stiles tells it, he went to Albany with a suitcase of greenbacks and the legislature legalized the disputed new shares.¹⁴ He later bought the American Union Telegraph Company and merged it into Western Union in 1881, and Western Union came to dominate the industry.¹⁶ George had both chokepoints in view. He wrote that “the trunk lines of railroad unite to raise rates and pool their earnings,” and that the great telegraph company, “by the power of associated capital deprives the people of the United States of the full benefits of a beneficent invention.”¹⁷

James J. Hill. Hill is the fair counterweight. The historian Burton Folsom splits the barons into “political entrepreneurs,” who sought help from the state, and “market entrepreneurs,” who did not. He notes that Congress gave the subsidized transcontinentals “almost 100 million acres and $61 million in Federal loans,” while Hill built the Great Northern from 1879 to 1893 “with no Federal subsidy.”¹⁸ Folsom’s figure is lower than the National Archives’ 174 million acres. The sources count differently, so I give each in its own words. To be fair to the other side as well, Hill did inherit land grants that came with the Minnesota lines he bought, which the territorial legislature had granted at nearly 2,460,000 acres.¹⁹

John D. Rockefeller. Standard Oil was formed on January 10, 1870, and “by the late 1880s, Standard Oil controlled 90% of American refineries,” according to the Library of Congress.²⁰ In Cleveland it held 21 of 26 refineries by 1872.²¹ The chokepoint was refining and the railroads that carried oil. Stiles notes that Rockefeller worked with the Vanderbilts to obtain preferential rates.¹⁴ In 1911 the Supreme Court found Standard Oil in violation of the Sherman Act, and it was split into 34 companies.²⁰²²

Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie made steel cheap, and in 1901 he sold out for $480 million. Morgan congratulated him on becoming “the richest man in the world.”²³ He then gave much of it away. Carnegie and his foundation paid for 2,509 public libraries, 1,681 of them in the United States.²⁴

J. P. Morgan. Morgan was the banker’s baron. His United States Steel was capitalized at $1.4 billion in a year when federal revenues were $587 million.²³ In the Panic of 1907 his actions helped keep the New York Stock Exchange open, and the panic led to the Federal Reserve.²⁵ His chokepoint was capital itself, the gate every railroad and trust had to pass through to grow.

Samuel Insull. Insull, a protégé of Thomas Edison, built Commonwealth Edison into the dominant supplier around Chicago. He pioneered time-of-use rates, expanded his customer base and lowered prices.²⁶ His holding company, Middle West Utilities, at one time had operating subsidiaries in 30 states and served 5,300 communities. By 1930, 19 holding companies controlled 90 percent of the nation’s operating utilities. Middle West went into receivership on April 24, 1932.²⁷ Congress answered with the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, meant to ensure that structures like “Samuel Insull’s utilities empire were never allowed to exist again.”²⁸ Insull himself was tried for fraud in 1934 and acquitted.²⁹

Electricity mattered to George’s argument even before Insull. George had already observed that “every labor-saving invention, whether it be a steam plow, a telegraph, an improved process of smelting ores, a perfecting printing press, or a sewing machine, has a tendency to increase rent.”³⁰ Power was a great labor-saving invention, and the rent gathered at the wires and the sites.

Jensen Huang founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has run it ever since.³¹ In the quarter ended July 26, 2026, NVIDIA reported revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106 percent in a year, with $89.0 billion from data centers and a non-GAAP gross margin of 75.0 percent.³² A margin like that is the sign of something buyers cannot easily get anywhere else.

Morris Chang and C. C. Wei. Chang founded TSMC in 1987 as a dedicated foundry, a factory any designer could use without building its own.³³ C. C. Wei became chairman and CEO in June 2024.³⁴ In the second quarter of 2026 TSMC held a 72.5 percent share of foundry revenue, and its most advanced capacity was fully booked.³⁵ It is also spreading out: in March 2025 it announced plans to invest a total of $165 billion in the United States.³⁶

Christophe Fouquet and ASML. The narrowest chokepoint of all is a Dutch machine. IBM Research states that “ASML is the only company in the world that makes EUV lithography machines for producing these tiny chips at scale,” and the most advanced machines sell for €320 million to €400 million.³⁷ Fouquet is ASML’s chief executive.³⁸

Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai. Amazon’s founder handed the chief executive role to Jassy, who had run AWS, in 2021.³⁹ In the second quarter of 2026, Synergy Research put AWS at 28 percent of the cloud market, Microsoft at 20 and Google at 15, in a market of $143.4 billion for the quarter.⁴⁰ The spending is the size of a national budget. Jassy said in July 2026, “We now believe we will spend approximately $220 billion in cash CapEx in 2026.” Alphabet guided to $195 billion to $205 billion, Microsoft to about $175 billion, and Meta to $130 billion to $145 billion.⁴¹ Together that is on the order of $720 billion in a single year.

Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg. The labs began as software companies and are turning into landholders. OpenAI announced Stargate on January 21, 2025, a venture to invest $500 billion over four years in AI infrastructure, and its first request for proposals was “focused on land and power.”⁴² Musk’s xAI built its Colossus cluster in Memphis in 122 days, then doubled it to 200,000 GPUs in 92 days.⁴³ SpaceX completed its acquisition of xAI on February 2, 2026.⁴⁴ Meta is building Hyperion in Louisiana, which Zuckerberg says will scale to five gigawatts and cover most of the footprint of Manhattan.⁴⁵

Then the barons began renting to one another. In May 2026 Anthropic, where Amodei is chief executive, signed to use all of the compute at Colossus 1, more than 300 megawatts and over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs.⁴⁶ SpaceX’s IPO filing says Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for capacity across Colossus and Colossus II, terminable by either side on 90 days’ notice.⁴⁷ That is a ground rent in all but name.