Just came to say that spending $800M on a sound recording studio expansion was literally insane even before the current AI boom.

Quite simply, there's no practical combination of top-tier hardware that you can buy which will put you even close to that number, even if replicated 8-10 times as the article implies multiple rooms.

That tells me most of the money would be poured into vanity aspects - literally gold toilets and the like - which would impact the ego, not the sound.

It's easy to spend $1M on gear. You would have to work really, really hard to spend $25M on gear. I'd bet that everything Steve Albini has in his two rooms is worth under $10M.