Five Things Tech: EU, Huge Data Centers, Small Data Centers, Computer Science, Elon's Prophecies
This is everything you should read about Tech right now.
Heya, did you notice this? Everyone is talking about AI, but almost nobody is talking about where the electricity comes from.
That gap is the most interesting story in tech right now, and it runs through everything below: Europe waking up to its tech dependency, data centers quietly becoming the most powerful buyers in hard tech, startups stuffing servers into homes to spare the grid, and a billionaire whose track record on big promises is worth counting. The hype is loud. The infrastructure is where the real fight is.
Grab a coffee and read this now! And hug a data center near you!
EU plots long game against US digital supremacy
Instead, the tech sovereignty package — motivated in no small part by U.S. President Donald Trump’s weaponization of Europe’s dependence on American firms — takes a longer-term view: boost the continent’s players so they can eventually challenge their U.S. rivals.
“We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement. “This is about protecting our citizens, defending our interests and making our own choices.”
Ever since I started using Linux some 30 years ago, I had this eerie feeling that our dependency on US tech is not in the best interest of Europe. Now finally politicians have come to understand just how import tech is for our everyday lives, our economy and our society. And just think about the gazillions of dollars the EU spends on crappy products from Microsoft that just lead to frustration…
Thank God For Data Centers
This is true for obvious things like GPUs, inference chips, and DRAM, but it’s also true for companies that you wouldn’t typically associate with AI data centers, like supersonic turbines, enhanced geothermal, modular construction, high-voltage direct current grids, solid-state transformers, silicon photonics, optical fiber, lasers, batteries, and nuclear.
Many of these technologies have the potential to be better and cheaper than the incumbent technologies they aim to replace, but they have been too expensive and unproven to compete. With backlogs in all of the traditional inputs to Data Centers, however, developers are willing to pay up for new technologies that can deliver fast, which gives them the opportunity to scale up and cost down.
For these technologies, Data Centers act as a third type of Buyer of Capabilities, a commercial analog operating on DoD-style procurement logic but commercial timescales.
Given the size of the budgets, the relative smallness of any one input’s cost relative to the overall project cost and revenue opportunity, and the speed with which Data Centers are making decisions and putting down deposits, Data Centers may meaningfully increase the odds of success of hard tech companies and Vertical Integrators more than the market realizes.
I have to agree here, even though I do not want data centers taking over the landscape everywhere. They are huge and operating them poses many interesting new challenges. Solving these challenges will have plenty of amazing side-effects. Cheaper energy will be one of them.
Startups are installing tiny data centers in people’s homes to reduce strain on the beleaguered electrical grid
Span’s XFRA models are part of a wider distributed network of AI infrastructure, using a home’s underused electrical capacity to create something similar to a cloud of compute that can be given to service providers. Span can install nodes at six-times the speed of centralized 100-megawatt data centers and at about one-fifth of the cost of construction.
The company charges a flat monthly fee of about $150. In return, it essentially pays a host’s electricity and internet bills. The computing power generated from the nodes are distributed to customers like hyperscalers and AI companies. XFRA is not designed to replace commercial data centers, according to the company, but rather to reduce strain on the grid.
And if those small datacenters all have some networking and proxy elements to them, they could also reduce the bandwith needed on the data networks.
There’s Never Been a Better Time to Study Computer Science
At the same time, new courses could offer students an introduction to software development without the theoretical baggage and proof-writing they might have otherwise had to wade through. Geoffrey Challen, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, plans to offer a new course this fall in which he will teach students to develop software “without writing, reading, debugging, or viewing a single line of code,” he told me. Northwestern is also slated to offer an “entry-level creative coding” class for students without technical backgrounds. For all the talk of AI-literacy programs that teach students how to use chatbots, the real innovation might be in developing courses that train students in basic software-development skills. Most colleges require introductory writing courses because it’s understood that clear written communication is an important cross-disciplinary skill—even for students who plan to study physics or math. Classes that teach students how to use AI coding tools could become commonplace, providing students of all backgrounds with a baseline software-engineering skill set.
I think this is an amazing time to study computer science and of course it helps to understand how software works even if you will never have to write it yourself.
Elon Musk Laid Out 602 Goals. We Counted How Many He Hit.
Strikingly, Mr. Musk’s annual rate of success declined over time, even as he made more promises. Of the 13 goals he declared in 2015, he later achieved nearly three-quarters of them, The Times found. But of the 27 claims he made in 2020, fewer than half have been accomplished on time. Some still have deadlines far in the future.
I think we should regulate and tax billionaires more. This is not healthy. Neither for them nor for our societies.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
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— Nico