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Three trillion dollars of AI commitments, tucked into footnotes where nobody has to call them capex - ain’t the world of finance grand? Meanwhile a town in Finland heats itself with 2,000 tons of sand, and solar quietly out-performed everything else while European nuclear plants ran short of cooling water. One of these approaches is going to look stupid in ten years. Also in this issue: a guy in Brussels tried to live three days without US tech, and ICE decided Meta's smart glasses are too toxic even for ICE.
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Why Big Tech’s AI Spending Is $3 Trillion Higher Than It Seems
Nine top tech companies had some $3 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments mostly related to AI, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of footnotes in their most recent securities filings. Those obligations are growing faster than traditional “capex,” which totaled about $600 billion over the past year they reported, and were about triple what the companies owe under their outstanding leases and long-term borrowings.
There is so much obvious financial engineering going on that one wonders who will ever be held accountable for all this.
‘The real challenge starts after sundown’: Europe’s heatwave boosted solar by up to 17% on hot days
Ember’s analysis found that during the late-June heatwave this summer, daily electricity demand rose byup to 28 per cent in Italy, 23 per cent in Hungary, 14 per cent in France and 13 per cent in Spain compared with pre-heatwave days.
It says as heatwave-driven demand increased, solar was the only major power source to perform “better than usual”. Compared with other days in June and July, average daily solar generation during the heatwaves was 17 per cent higher in France and Hungary, five per cent higher in Spain and the same in Italy.
“Solar is already doing heavy lifting during heatwaves, but the real challenge starts after sundown,” says senior energy analyst Chris Rosslowe.
While nuclear power plants don’t have enough water for cooling during heatwaves, solar just does what it is supposed to be doing,
Finland’s radical answer to renewable energy’s biggest headache: The world’s largest sand battery
A small town in southern Finland has turned to the world’s largest commercial sand battery to fix what many see as the most critical problem facing renewable energy: intermittency.
Standing at 13 meters tall and 15 meters wide, the eye-catching facility uses 2,000 metric tons of crushed soapstone to store clean energy in the form of heat to provide 100 megawatt-hours of thermal energy.
That’s enough to provide the 5,000 residents of Pornainen with nearly one month of heat demand through the summer — and roughly one week of demand in the winter.
Give this some time and we will see super-efficient sand-based energy storage outside of towns and villages. This is just a start and we have enough sand everywhere.
Flipping the kill switch: I survived 72 hours without US tech
No iPhone. No Mac. No Slack or Teams. No Google Search or Maps. No ChatGPT. No WhatsApp or Signal. No Facebook or Instagram feeds. No credit card payments.
I wondered if I would turn into a digital monk.
For three days, I set out to live and work in Brussels as if U.S. tech had suddenly become unavailable to me overnight. It was a purposefully fictional scenario rooted in a very real European anxiety: what happens if Washington weaponizes our continent’s Silicon Valley dependence and reaches for the tech “kill switch?”
What now seems to be impossible, used to be a bit simpler. My first mobile phone was a Siemens S3, some 30 years ago, then a few Nokias. I also remember the ZX Spectrum and the Schneider CPC64, but then somehow Europeans thought that there is no money to be made in consumer tech anymore.
ICE Bars Its Workers From Wearing Meta’s Smart Glasses on the Job
ICE does not have a partnership with Meta, but its agents have come under fire in the last year for wearing the company’s smart glasses to protests and during immigration raids. ICE initially told employees the glasses were banned in June, according to an internal email obtained by The New York Times.
In the Department of Homeland Security’s budget proposal in April, the agency requested $7.5 million to develop its own smart glasses prototype to help with immigration enforcement, including glasses that can “enable biometric identification of illegal aliens.”
I assume that RayBan was thrilled about the partnership with Meta and now they see all the backlash, so I wonder how this will hurt their brand. Just imagine your product is so hated that not even the most hated organisation in the USA is allowed to wear it.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
🤖
— Nico