Five Things Tech: China, Twitter, Critical Minerals, 3D Map, Data Centers

Everything you should read about Tech right now.

It’s Saturday! Welcome back to Five Things Tech!

China has quietly pulled ahead in 66 out of 74 critical technologies, from nuclear energy to synthetic biology, which should finally push us to talk less about “not letting China win” and more about how to seriously ramp up our own innovation capacity.

While policymakers are still arguing, a bunch of trademark nerds launched Operation Bluebird and now want to resurrect Twitter, complete with bird logo and twitter.new, and it is hard not to root for anything that feels more like the old timeline and less like an outrage machine tuned for extremists. In California, Brimstone shows what that kind of innovation can look like, pivoting from low carbon cement to extracting critical minerals such as aluminum and magnesium from boring rocks like gabbro in order to chip away at China’s dominance in key supply chains.

At the same time, researchers released GlobalBuildingAtlas, a wild 3D dataset of 2.75 billion buildings worldwide at three meter resolution, which makes the school atlas generation feel very old and opens up new possibilities for understanding how and where people actually live. And down in New Mexico, a mysterious company wants to drop 165 billion dollars on a hyperscale data center campus in the desert, a massive bet that remote regions will transform into compute hubs, because apparently the future needs a lot more servers even if we are not entirely sure yet what we are going to run on them.

Saturday is a great tech to read about tech! 🤖