HS2 is now expected to cost up to £102.7 billion, which is roughly $130 billion. On a recent Bricks & Bytes episode, the panel started listing what that kind of money buys instead, and the list is genuinely absurd. Nearly all of Uber. The entire Artemis moon program to date. A double-digit chunk of the most valuable AI company on earth. This is not a serious argument that Britain should have bought DoorDash instead of a railway. It is a way of feeling the scale of the number, because £102.7 billion is so large it stops meaning anything. Here is what it actually buys.
Big numbers break your brain. Tell someone a project costs £102.7 billion and they nod, but nobody can actually picture it. It is too far outside daily experience. So on the show, after going through the grim details of the HS2 cost blowout, the panel did what people naturally do with a number that size. They started asking what else you could buy with it.
The exercise is only half a joke. Comparing a public infrastructure bill to private company valuations is not apples to apples, and nobody is pretending otherwise. A railway is an asset that runs for a century. A share price is a snapshot that moves every second. But opportunity cost is real, and the comparisons do one useful thing: they turn an abstract figure into something you can hold in your head.
So let us do it properly, with current numbers rather than back-of-the-napkin guesses. All valuations and costs below are as of mid-2026 and will drift over time, but the orders of magnitude make the point. Here is what £102.7 billion, give or take, gets you.
£102.7 billion is roughly $130 billion. That is enough to buy nearly all of Uber, the entire Artemis moon program to date, or about an eighth of the most valuable AI company in the world. It also happens to be the projected cost of one delayed railway.
The tech giants you could just buy
Nearly all of Uber, or DoorDash with change to spare
Start with the companies people use every day. Uber’s market value sits around $144 billion in mid-2026, so £102.7 billion, about $130 billion, would buy you nearly the whole thing. Not a stake. Nearly the entire global rideshare and delivery business that operates in thousands of cities. One railway between London and Birmingham, or almost all of Uber. That is the trade on the table.
Prefer food to taxis? DoorDash is worth roughly $66 billion, so the HS2 budget would buy the entire company twice over and still leave you tens of billions in pocket. The panel ran through a similar list on the show, naming Airbnb, Shopify, Snowflake, and others in the rough $100 billion neighborhood. The specific names matter less than the pattern. For the cost of one delayed rail line, you could own an outright giant of the modern economy.
None of this means buying Uber would have been wiser than building rail. It would not. But it reframes the waste. When a project triples its budget, the gap is not abstract. The overrun alone, the difference between the early estimates and £102.7 billion, is itself worth more than most companies you have ever heard of.
Way more cool than a railway line. And you know what else you could buy? An entire moon program.The Bricks & Bytes panel, on the HS2 budget
The moonshot, almost literally
The entire Artemis program, with billions to spare
Here is the one that really lands. NASA’s Artemis program, the multi-decade effort to put humans back on the Moon, has cost about $93 billion from 2012 through 2025, according to estimates cited from its own auditors. That covers the giant Space Launch System rocket, the Orion crew capsule, the ground systems, all of it, across more than a decade of development.
In other words, the projected cost of HS2 is roughly the entire cost of getting humanity back toward the Moon, with money left over. A single Artemis launch runs north of $4 billion on its own. So Britain’s high-speed rail line, London to Birmingham, is in the same financial universe as a national space program spanning years and multiple crewed missions. When the panel reached for the moon comparison as a joke, it turned out to be almost exactly right.
That is the value of these comparisons. Not to argue Britain should have gone to space instead, but to make the scale visceral. A railway and a moon program should not cost the same. The fact that they roughly do tells you something went badly wrong with the railway.
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About an eighth of the most valuable AI company on earth
For a comparison that feels very 2026, look at AI. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, was valued at around $965 billion in late May 2026 after a funding round that briefly made it the most valuable AI company in the world. At that valuation, £102.7 billion, roughly $130 billion, would buy you somewhere around an eighth of the entire company.
Think about that next to a railway. The same money is either a 13 percent stake in the company many believe is at the center of the biggest technology shift in a generation, or it is partial funding for a train line that will open, if all goes to plan, sometime around 2039. One of those bets is in motion right now. The other will arrive when today’s graduates are deep into their careers.
Again, the point is not that governments should run venture portfolios instead of building infrastructure. They should not, and a railway delivers public value a share certificate never will. The point is that £102.7 billion is a staggering amount of capital, and seeing it priced against the assets defining the current economy makes the figure real in a way the headline number never can.
| What £102.7bn (~$130bn) buys | Approx. price | What you get | When you get it |
|---|---|---|---|
| HS2 (London to Birmingham) | Up to £102.7bn | One high-speed rail line, half the original scope | ~2036 to 2039 |
| Nearly all of Uber | ~$144bn market cap | A global rideshare and delivery business | Today |
| DoorDash, twice over | ~$66bn market cap | The whole company, with billions to spare | Today |
| The Artemis moon program | ~$93bn to 2025 | A decade-plus of lunar exploration development | In progress |
| ~13% of Anthropic | ~$965bn valuation | A stake in a leading AI company | Today |
The UK government’s latest estimate, given on 19 May 2026, is a range of £87.7 billion to £102.7 billion in 2025 prices. That is roughly $110 billion to $130 billion. The figure is far above the original estimates from 2010, and the project’s first services are not expected until somewhere between 2036 and 2039. (Source)
Roughly, yes, in the sense of total market value. Uber’s market capitalization was about $144 billion in late May 2026, so £102.7 billion (around $130 billion) is close to the whole company. In practice you cannot buy a public company at its exact market cap, but as a scale comparison it holds: the HS2 budget is in the same range as one of the world’s best-known tech firms. (Source)
It is close. Estimates cited from NASA’s auditors put the total Artemis program cost at about $93 billion from 2012 through 2025, with each individual launch costing over $4 billion. So the HS2 budget is in the same ballpark as more than a decade of lunar program development. (Source)
At Anthropic’s late-May 2026 valuation of around $965 billion, roughly $130 billion would be about 13 percent of the company. The valuation came from a funding round that briefly made Anthropic the most valuable AI company in the world, eclipsing OpenAI. Private valuations move quickly, so this is a snapshot, not a fixed figure. (Source)
Not necessarily, and that is not the argument here. Infrastructure delivers public value over decades that a company share never will, and the government concluded that cancelling HS2 would cost about as much as finishing it. The comparisons are about feeling the scale of the spend and the overrun, not claiming Britain should have bought tech stocks instead. (Source)
New Civil Engineer: HS2 cost estimated to exceed £100bn
Macrotrends: Uber market cap
Macrotrends: DoorDash market cap
Business Today: Artemis program cost breakdown
TechCrunch: Anthropic’s $965bn valuation
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