Indeed, I wonder if it'd be easier, even if as you point out more expensive, to build a data center in a city. Just renovate an existing industrial building and hope nobody sees the planning notices.

Just responding to this point as an FYI. Data Centres are so specifically designed that it easier to lay waste to any existing structure that is on the land and start over. The company I work for has thousands of warehouses world-wide and really wanted to utilize what they had. The only practical solution was to fill the warehouses with data centre "modules" (think data centre in a shipping container) and even then there was an amazing amount of re-fit work. And nobody wants those data centre containers anymore.

Another random point: Data Centres in traditional hot-spots for them and/or inside cities are called "Tier I Markets" in the business. Latency was a really important consideration at one point (and still is for a lot of apps), so data centres needed to be near to population centres. So-called "AI" workloads don't care so much as they are more request-response in nature, so they are going up anywhere and everywhere where you can get power and permitting permission.

(Disclaimer: my organization does not consume water for DC cooling (we use air chillers), and all our power is renewable).

Forty bucks lets you turn pages on a non-paper device. What a world we live in.

I hope that after I die, the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."

I don't recommend it.

I'm old. Like, well, really REALLY old. And you would think being essentially immortal would come with perks like being able to see, but having effective ciliary muscles and them being completely dead are two different things.

I watched the preso and my first thought was "Jesus (... thank you again sir), Apple keeps making better phones for old people!" This seems like one such phone, although I don't see myself opening my wallet for one until my 15 pro max is truly utterly dead (heh), and I know for sure that the hinge / crease is going to hold up.

It wasn't 7 years to find the right spot. It was 7 years to realize Texas isn't as accommodating as he hoped, and he can buy off a broke state cheaper than a rich state. Of course, finding enough people to move to the Texan Everglades was easy compared to finding enough who will live in the bayous to run his steel penis rocket facilities.

Just a couple of random notes about the practicality of this.

• Some new inference data centers don't have gens. The idea is that with inference if a resource is not available it can be requested from another pool (availability zone). In these cases when the power goes out, the UPSs hold the load for 4-5 minutes to give the servers time to drop and then the site goes dark.
• Imagine 32 diesel freight train engines all powering up. That's what this is like for a site-wide utility power failure for a smallish data center. Thankfully most DCs now require an enclosure for each gen which limits the noise they produce while running.
• Most providers have between 24 and 48 hours of diesel fuel on-site. This is either in large central storage tanks or in belly tanks dedicated to each gen. A provider would have typically a 4-hour SLA on fuel delivery so once the gens start running a call is made to start running fuel trucks to the DC to begin the refueling process.

It's probably a way to prevent model collapse. So they don't train LLMs on data that has been generated by LLMs.

It is more likely that Canada has 10 new reactors on-line in 14 years than Slashdot having Unicode support by then.

In the data centre business this newly-invented Megapod(tm) is called a module. My company probably has 30 or more of them, and I've seen this "data centre in a can" concept around for the past 15 years. Doing it in shipping containers was all the rage for a while.

Of course the old ones were not direct-to-chip liquid cooled, but I'm sure the providers of these modules already have that. In any case, this is in no way a new concept -- just, as you say, some shiny branding.

Is anyone, *anyone* surprised? Step 1: Depend on MS. Step 2: Get screwed. That's the process.

A news aggregator should write blurbs like a news site, and not assume every reader knows what every proper noun is. Plex, an animal husbandry fanservice anime sharing company, ...

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy is (or at least use to be) well known in teaching circles. That is, if you call out a child for being a certain way they will often change their behaviour to make that come true, whether positive or negative. It's interesting that the same thing seems true for AI models.

Evaporative chillers are not necessary to cool a data center, certainly not in Michigan. We chill data centers in Arizona with no water usage at all. The data center designers / owners are just being cheap. Sure, if you can get the local municipality to give you water you can use that to lower your costs and increase your efficiency. But it's not necessary. All our data centers use 100% renewable power (if not available then we purchase credits), and we cool with air chillers, and despite these additional costs we're certainly not going bankrupt or being left with unsold capacity.

It's (as always) about the money. The fact that they are going ahead with the project anyway tells me that they will just switch to air chillers.

To directly respond to your comment (which is spot-on), a new facility being stood up for LANL is likely to be direct-to-chip liquid cooling. Generally we don't do full immersion because of the costs and complexity (a modern AI 52U rack is pushing 5000lbs now and fully immersing it will put additional structural strain on the slab floor), but the technology to distribute chilled water from the facility through CDUs (coolant distribution units) to manifolds in the racks and then directly to the chips needing to be cooled is finally getting mature.

About 40 years ago a friend of mine stated that this problem had been solved and that slow motion photography proved that the cat used its tail to right itself. I actually had a tailless cat nearby (lost it in an accident with a car) which I retrieved, held out in front of him about two feet off the ground, and let go. It landed on its feet.

What's curious is how long this has been "studied" and how many different theories there have been!

You can stare at the full moon all night if you like, because the albedo of the moon has filtered most of the light including the UV band that naturally passes through our own atmosphere. The three mile circle illuminated by a mirror would bounce a significantly higher amount of UV than the moon's albedo. If you treat the 60ft reflector as an analog to a pinhole in a pinhole camera, the circular area on the Earth surface would be a rough projection of the image of the sun.

(1) I wonder how they calculate the UV exposure for the observer on the surface within the illumination area.

(2) I wonder if you'd be able to detect places in a coherent projection where sunspots or coronal ejections are reflected through the "pinhole" effect of this arrangement.