notboring.co

Base Power Company: Chapter 3

These companies were largely built around the winning assets of the previous energy system: oil fields, refineries, pipelines, tankers, centralized generation, poles, and wires. The energy transition that's been underway has already created new bottlenecks – the grid struggles matching variable supply with unpredictable demand, for example – and therefore new valuable positions. Then the most ravenous consumer of electrons in history entered the market in the form of data centers.

ai-supremacy.com

AI Things, Bits and Bites

Nvidia makes a rather outrageous claim that AI factory compute is becoming an investable asset. It's a $500 Billion third-party financing gig. Nvidia has cash to spare and will backstop up to $125 billion, or 25% of the potential deals.

stratechery.com

2026.32: Earnings and Learnings

Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google are all spending astronomical amounts of money building infrastructure from AI. Wall Street's reaction, however, differed markedly, based on the cost of the frontier (or not), the potential for immediate monetization (or not), and the clarity of vision (or not).

whyisthisinteresting

The Mobile Lounge Edition

One of the ways I like to describe Hong Kong—one of my favorite cities—is that it's a vision for the future that still might arrive. The Central Mid-Levels Escalator that starts at Queen's Road and rises through Hong Kong's hills opened in 1993, and gives off strong vibes that whoever built it was sure this was a thing that would exist everywhere someday.

ftav

This is nuts. When's the crash?

There is a potential '2008 real estate' analogy in AI infrastructure. Hyperscalers and neo-clouds have built data centers based on promises of future compute purchases, creating a credit-like structure tied to tenants whose long-term profitability is uncertain.

whyisthisinteresting

The Dubai Creek Edition

In 1958, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed, then Ruler of Dubai, borrowed around a half a million dollars from the Emir of Kuwait to dredge the creek. Dubai had no meaningful oil wealth at the time. What Sheikh Rashid had was a conviction that trade would define the city, and that the creek needed to be deep enough for modern ships.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 109

The Blue Line is running. The trains arrive. The system works. But the people maintaining it are still flown in from China, the contract that keeps it running is approaching expiration, and there is no public maintenance budget.

stratechery.com

2026.21: The Data Center Veto

AI, however, depends on data centers in the physical world, and building data centers needs permission. This gives normal people the sort of veto power over AI they didn't have in the face of globalization; I make the case in Monday's Update and on Sharp Tech that understanding this dynamic is more important that trying to correct misinformation, which is a symptom, not a cause, of data center opposition.

stratechery.com

Data Center Discontent, Understanding the Opposition, Fixing the Problem

There are understandable reasons for people to oppose data centers; the only solution that will work is simply paying them off.

wired.com

Old Oil and Gas Wells Could Find Second Life Producing Clean Energy

States across the US are looking to take major sources of pollution and use them to generate much-needed power.

dwarkesh.com

Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served

if you do not batch together many users, the cost and the economics you get can be a thousand times worse than if you do batch many users together.

wired.com

A Single Strike Won’t Shut Off the Gulf’s Desalination System

The Gulf's water system is built with layers of backup, but it relies on continuous operation to hold.

upstartsmedia.com

The AI Ambition Behind A Startup Bringing Better Internet To Colombia And Mexico

"I think in a really weird way, we're this alternative bet on building crazy, ambitious infrastructure, not just in El Segundo, but doing it in places outside the U.S.," Heath says.

upstartsmedia.com

The $1.5B Compute Startup Helping AI's Hottest Companies Find GPUs

"We have the aspiration to enable the global flow of compute, and we think that's going to be a multi-trillion-dollar market," Moushey says. "And to do that, we have to be a little bit more clear that we're not this weird compute provider anymore. We're actually building the market infrastructure to solve this dislocation of supply and demand."

3quarksdaily.com

A Big Night Light in the Sky? Start-Up Wants to Launch a Space Mirror

A start-up company wants to light up the night with 50,000 big mirrors orbiting Earth, bouncing sunlight to the night side of the planet to power solar farms after sunset, provide lighting for rescue workers and illuminate city streets, among other things.