Which Gauges Read the Rock?

There is a moment on every drill floor when the geology stops being a theory — not when the seismic comes back, nor when the logging unit's curves scroll down the screen, but when the well is perforated, the choke is opened, and the formation either flows or does not.

On the seventeenth of July, Paul Soto, Mason Thieu and Jeffrey Allen of the Federal Reserve Board published a FEDS Note that amounts to the official logging suite for the AI buildout — eleven figures spanning capability, cost, investment, adoption, productivity and labour, arranged along the classic sequence of a general-purpose technology: capability precedes adoption, adoption precedes productivity.

It is careful, honest work whose candour is its virtue — nearly every curve wears its own health warning, from the reminder that only about a third of Amazon's gross plant is servers to the admission that adoption surveys register breadth, not depth.