Five Things Tech: Chips, Sky Datacenters, Powersludge, Vibecoding, China

Everything you should read about Tech right now.

Hooray, it’s Saturday! Welcome back to Five Things Tech!

A chip mega project in the Arizona desert shows how badly the US has forgotten how to build cutting edge factories at scale, while at the same time some people seriously think it is a good idea to shoot datacenters into orbit for AI workloads, which experts politely call nonsense because the hardware, costs and physics just do not line up at all. In Mannheim, engineers quietly turn sewage into e methanol for ships and prove that Europe can actually decarbonize heavy transport with clever chemistry instead of just writing strategy papers.

Anil Dash nails how “vibe coding” simultaneously disempowers organized tech workers and empowers everyone else by letting non coders ship products without asking anyone for permission, which feels very familiar when playing around with AI tools on side projects.

And Noah Smith argues that China has built a new kind of innovation machine by tightly integrating the whole pipeline from basic research to industrial scale deployment, which should make policymakers in Brussels, Berlin and Washington a bit nervous when they look at their own fragmented systems.

Enjoy! 🤖