τAU ▶ Play

τotal Addressable Universe

An idle game about spending money on artificial intelligence until there is no more universe to spend it on.

"We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started." — Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, The Gentle Singularity, June 2025

TAU stands for Total Addressable Universe, which is the joke: your addressable market is every atom in existence, and you still run out. The τ is also the tau lepton, which is why the favicon is a Greek letter.

You start with an eight-dollar-a-month subscription. You finish by converting the last remaining matter in the observable universe into datacentres, at which point the universe collapses, you announce that AGI is closer than ever, and a fresh universe is provisioned so you can do it again. Across the top of the screen, a news ticker runs 123 real, sourced, attributed quotes from the people actually building this industry. Not one of them is invented. They did not need to be.

Play it

The game is a single static page. There is no login, no cloud save, no matchmaking, no season pass, and no server that can go down and take your progress with it.

Play here: https://totaladdressableuniverse.ai

Nothing to install and nothing to sign up for. Open it and press the button.

It works on a phone, on a laptop, and on the machine at the back of the office that nobody has updated since 2019. It uses one browser tab and roughly the processing power of a clock.

Your first five minutes

  1. Press Pitch to Investors. It has no deck and no revenue behind it. Press it anyway. Each press is one dollar of Funding.
  2. Buy A Go Plan for $8. You are now, technically, an AI company.
  3. Keep pitching. Buy more Go Plans. They cost 15% more every time, which is the first law of this genre and also of enterprise procurement.
  4. At ten Go Plans, A Plus Plan unlocks. At ten of those, a Pro Plan. The ladder opens upward from there and does not stop until it runs out of universe.
  5. Buy the first upgrade the moment it appears. Upgrades are where almost all of your growth comes from. Owning more of a tier is arithmetic; upgrading a tier is geometry.

Somewhere around the fifth minute, clicking stops mattering and the machine starts earning faster than your finger can. This is the moment the genre is built around, and it is the same moment the industry is built around: the point where the spending starts to look like it is producing something, and everyone stops asking who is paying for it.

How the game works

Deliberately conventional. The form is familiar on purpose, so that only the subject matter is strange. If you have played an idle game before, you already know how this one works. If you have not, everything you need is below.

Funding

One currency: Funding ($). You have a balance and a rate per second.

Funding is not revenue. Nothing you build in this game sells anything to anybody. Funding arrives because you are spending, and it arrives faster the more you spend, which is not how a business works but is very much how the last three years have gone. There is a Pitch to Investors button that pays one dollar a press, and its subtitle reads "No deck. No revenue. No problem."

The number gets large. It gets large enough that the game carries a big-number library to keep counting past 10³⁰⁸, which is the point where ordinary computer arithmetic gives up and returns infinity. You will pass that point. You will pass it in the first universe.

The ladder: twenty tiers

Twenty tiers of compute, in six eras. Each costs 15% more every time you buy one, and each unlocks the next at ten owned — with one exception right at the top, where the probe needs only three Matrioshka Brains, because nobody ever gets to ten. Prices below are the base price of the first unit.

# Tier Base cost What it is
Rented — you own nothing at all
1 A Go Plan $8 The cheap tier, bought on a personal card and expensed later.
2 A Plus Plan $20 Buys the model that was state of the art nine months ago.
3 A Pro Plan $200 Ten times the tier below, for reasons the pricing page calls "advanced reasoning".
4 A Pile of Token Credits $1,200 An allowance, revocable at will, repriced twice since you budgeted for it.
5 A Spot Instance $7,200 Someone else's GPU, until they want it back.
Owned — silicon with your name on the invoice
6 A Whitewell $43,200 The unit of account for the entire industry. Two-year lead time.
7 A Vera Diamond $259K Almost none of the price is silicon. It costs what it costs because eleven buyers want every unit.
8 A Compute Sled $2.07M Eight accelerators bolted to one board. The loading bay needed reinforcing.
9 Server Rack $18.7M Eight sleds, one power supply, zero redundancy.
Facilities — buildings
10 A Small Data Center $527M Forty megawatts on the edge of a town that was not consulted.
11 Data Center $7.44B Announced as an investment in the community. There are eleven jobs.
12 Hyperscale Campus $106B Named after a Greek god. Drinks like a small city.
Power — the constraint stops being chips
13 A Hydroelectric Dam $7.46T Submerges a valley, ends a fishery, relocates four thousand people. The filing calls this "renewable".
14 A Nuclear Power Plant $2.39e16 Eight years late. The decommissioning bond is somebody else's problem by design.
15 A Fusion Plant $7.65e19 Nobody has run one at break-even for more than a few seconds. You have bought nine.
Sovereign
16 A Country-Sized Buildout $2.45e23 Generation, transmission, land and legislature, end to end, for one workload. Capped at 195.
Cosmic
17 Orbital Data Center $7.82e26 Someone did the thermodynamics on a whiteboard and someone else did the financing on a napkin.
18 Dyson Swarm $2.5e30 A hundred million mirrors around the star, each one a line item. Earth is in permanent partial eclipse.
19 Matrioshka Brain $6.43e31 Nested shells; each computes on the waste heat of the one above.
20 A Von Neumann Probe $8.04e34 It builds the factory that builds the probe.

The prices are deliberately irregular. Ratios between neighbouring tiers run from about ×2.5 to about ×12 in the early game, and then jump by a factor of 3,200 per tier for the five tiers from the dam up to the Dyson Swarm. That irregularity is on purpose: it means "buy the newest thing" is not automatically the right move, and it means the economy cannot be solved on paper.

There are no hidden milestone bonuses. Output is strictly, boringly linear in how many you own. Every multiplier in the game is something you deliberately bought. An earlier version handed out secret bonuses at round numbers and nobody noticed them, so that growth was moved into the shop where you can see it.

Upgrades

Every tier has six upgrades, unlocking at 1 / 5 / 10 / 25 / 50 / 100 owned, multiplying that tier's output by ×2 / ×2 / ×3 / ×4 / ×5 / ×6. A fully upgraded tier produces 1,440 times what it otherwise would. They are named the way the industry names things: Annual Billing, Shared Login, Procurement Blind Spot, Committed Spend Discount, Seat Sprawl Audit, Rate Limit Exemption, FP8 Quantization, Dark Matter Accounting, Speculative Fabrication.

On top of those there are upgrades that lift a whole era at once, upgrades that improve your pitching (Founder Mode, Vibes-Based Diligence, Narrative Premium, TAM Expansion, Down Round Denial), and a sequence of funding rounds that runs Seed, A, B, Vision Fund, Sovereign, Circular Deal Structure, Federal Backstop, and finally Systemically Important. 136 upgrades in the game altogether.

The gate at 5 owned matters more than it looks. How deep you go into a tier is inversely proportional to how high the tier is: you will finish the first universe owning a couple of hundred Go Plans and exactly one probe. With gates at 1 / 10 / 25 / 50 / 100, the tier earning most of your income could only ever unlock one of its upgrades before it went obsolete. Adding the gate at 5 took the proportion of upgrades bought while their tier still mattered from 38% to 56%.

Idling, and being away

It is an idle game. It idles.

Being away is worse than playing, but it is never wasted, and you can never lose progress by going to bed. One of the permanent upgrades improves those bands substantially.

Milestones

Forty-two of them, and they grant nothing at all. No multiplier, no currency, no bonus. They exist to be a record of what you did: Pre-Revenue, Thermal Event, Windowless, Named After A God, Renewable, Technically, Five More Years, Out Of Countries, This Is Not Scalable, Larger Than Most Economies, The Seven Trillion, Nothing Changed, It Keeps Not Changing.

Each carries a grade — 19 bronze, 15 silver, 8 gold — which records how hard it was to get. They used to carry a small permanent bonus each, and because they survive a universe collapse, they quietly became a second prestige track worth about ×9 on its own. That broke the rule that permanent progress comes from exactly one place, so the bonuses were removed and the grades kept.

The country cap, and World Government

A Country-Sized Buildout is the only producer in the game with a hard purchase cap: 195. You cannot buy a 196th, because there are not 196 countries.

Once you have all of them the tier stops contributing growth, and you are pushed off-world whether your economy is ready or not. This is intentional and it is supposed to hurt.

There is a way out, eventually. World Government is the only upgrade in the game that is not a multiplier: it removes the cap entirely, on the reasoning that a sufficiently large buildout can petition for statehood and then subdivide. It is revealed the moment you own all 195 — so you see it from the wrong side of the wall — and it costs more money than the universe you are standing in contains. It is scenery for your whole first run. It becomes buyable in your second.

The Von Neumann Probe

The last thing on the ladder is not a tier. It is the point of the game.

A Von Neumann Probe produces no money whatsoever. You buy exactly one. It flies, it lands, and the system it lands in becomes a settled system. Every settled system then builds another probe, forever, and every settled system adds 1% to everything you earn across the entire ladder — so the Go Plans you bought in the first thirty seconds are still being multiplied at the end of the run.

Flight time grows as the cube root of the fleet, because space is three dimensional and the Nth nearest unclaimed system is that much further away. That single choice governs the whole endgame:

N ≈ t⁶ / (build time × flight time)³

Steep, but polynomial. It compounds for the entire run and it can never run away from you. Both times have cubic leverage on the size of the fleet, which is why the three upgrade tracks stay worth buying indefinitely:

There is no randomness anywhere in it. Two players who make the same purchases at the same times get the same fleet, to the probe.

Almost Singularity

Progress toward "Universe consumed: X%" is tracked against your total funding ever earned. At 100% there is nothing left to convert, and the universe collapses automatically.

There is no confirm button, and there is no decision to make. Overshooting earns you nothing, so there is nothing to weigh up. What you get is a popup written as a founder's announcement:

We are very close now. Capability is improving faster than we expected, and from here the path to AGI is clear.

One constraint remained. We had converted all of the matter in this universe into datacenters, and the next training run needed slightly more than all of it. We think of this as an engineering problem rather than a limit. A fresh universe has already been identified: abundant matter, excellent power availability, no incumbent regulator.

Note that it contains no number, no date and no duration anywhere. Every claim in it is unfalsifiable, which is the only lesson the game's founder has learned from the real ones: the quotes in the ticker made the mistake of being specific, and the calendar caught them.

A full conversion grants you exactly one Almost Singularity, forever. Holding one does nothing by itself. It is not a multiplier and it is not a currency you accumulate — it is a single decision, spent one-for-one on a level of one permanent upgrade. Each new universe is ten times the size of the last.

The name is the joke. You never quite arrive.

The four permanent upgrades

The only things that survive a collapse, and the only things that make you permanently stronger. Sixteen levels between them. Each is written as an investor pitch rather than as physics — that no observation supports any of it, and that the relevant physicists say it is impossible, is treated throughout as a communications problem.

Upgrade What it does The pitch
Lower Gravity Constant Cosmic tiers get cheaper to stack "The constant was measured once, badly, by people without a datacenter to build. We are hiring a Head of Constants."
Higher Speed of Light A flat ×1.4 to everything, per level "Physicists have called the result impossible in language we found unconstructive. The limit was proposed in 1905 by someone with no exposure to modern workloads."
Unsupervised Learning Replaces the offline schedule outright, up to 95% for 48 hours "The model has been given the company card on the understanding that it will be sensible."
Lower Rationality Constant A momentum multiplier: every purchase adds to it, and it bleeds away in thirty seconds "Investors here do not evaluate; they notice."

A locked one is redacted, not merely greyed out. Before you meet its requirement it shows as "Undisclosed" with nothing but the requirement — no name, no effect, no pitch. Finding out what they are is most of the point of the second universe.

Lower Rationality Constant is the only one that changes how the game is played rather than how fast it goes, and it is gated behind three collapses for that reason. Its thirty-second decay is deliberate: at five minutes, anyone buying something once a minute sat at the cap permanently and it was a flat multiplier wearing a mechanic's costume. At thirty seconds you have to actually be mid-spree to see the top of it.

Saves

Your save is never uploaded anywhere. There is nowhere to upload it to, and nothing about how you played is reported to anybody.

Tips, if you want them

Skip this if you would rather work it out yourself; that is more fun.

  1. Buy upgrades before more units. A ×3 on a tier you own ten of beats three more units almost every time. This stays true for the whole game.
  2. Do not hoard. With one narrow exception at the very top of the ladder, money sitting in your balance earns nothing. Spend it on whatever pays for itself soonest.
  3. The exception is the endgame. The last stretch of the first universe is a long save toward the probe. That is intentional, it is the biggest purchase in the game, and it is the only time in the run that patience is correct.
  4. Depth beats height, early. A newly unlocked tier that you own one of is usually worse than the tier below it that you own forty of and have upgraded four times.
  5. Ten of a tier unlocks the next one — three, for the very last step. If the ladder seems stuck, count what you own of the highest tier you have.
  6. Going to bed is a legitimate strategy. Ten per cent of a very large number, for eight hours, is a lot of number.
  7. The first universe is the long one. It takes an engaged player something like eighteen hours of real time; every universe after that is faster than the one before, because your permanent upgrades carry and the universe only grows tenfold.

Where to go next