Greg Cook

Hello, Future. The ideas we communicate are the future we build. High agency, high customization. Views expressed here are my own. Nothing is written. tension

[Greg Cook @GregCook2011]

@Kantrowitz cc @scottastevenson

[Greg Cook @GregCook2011]

@Kantrowitz Great podcast

[Greg Cook @GregCook2011]

Happy Friday, keep going

[Greg Cook @GregCook2011]

@Sara_Imari We only know what we know until we learn more

[Greg Cook @GregCook2011]

@Sara_Imari Yes

[Sara Imari Walker @Sara_Imari]

Math exists within the architectures (biological and technological) evolved on Earth, we should not be so easily convinced it exists anywhere else in our universe. Math as our most “universal language” is merely evidence of our own evolutionary boundary in what we can describe. It is not a universal truth autonomous to our universe, nor does it reveal anything beyond a boundary to what we observe.

[Michael Thomas @curious_founder]

Meta is building dozens of massive tents at campuses across the US, sticking billions of dollars of chips inside, and powering them with off-grid turbines.

The AI race has officially entered its Mad Max phase.

Over the last month, I reviewed hundreds of documents and satellite images for Cleanview's latest report on behind-the-meter data centers. Meta's data center strategy, which is very visible from space, was one of the weirder approaches I came across.

Mark Zuckerberg recently ditched the data center designs that Meta had perfected over the last decade and told his team to stick tens of thousands of chips in tents outside their data center in New Albany, Ohio. Each of these chips costs about $60,000. Zuckerberg plans to stick billions of dollars worth of them in the tents.

The strategy has helped cut the time to build compute in half. The first five buildings at Meta’s New Albany, Ohio data center took between two and three years to build. Meta started building five ~125,000 square foot tents between April and June of 2026, according to city permits. Satellite images show the structures have all been built.

To power those "rapid deployment structures", as they are officially named, Meta signed a 10-year deal with Williams to build a pair of 200 MW off-grid power plants. Those power plants began construction about a year ago and are nearly complete.

Meta is using the same strategy to build a data center in Tennessee, bringing the total count of tent data centers to three.

Strategies like this are part of the reason behind-the-meter data center capacity is growing so quickly.

In Cleanview's report, I found that there's currently about 2 GW of BTM capacity online today. By the end of the year, it will likely be 3 GW—equivalent to three nuclear power plants. By the end of 2027, it could be as high as 13 GW—more than the power demand of NYC.

I've been talking to a lot of reporters about this research. When I told one reporter about these tents and other companies powering their data centers with jet engines, he said, "It's like a scene out of the movie Mad Max."

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

The crazy truth is, if you choose to accept it:

You are your own ceiling.
There is no one to blame but yourself.

[Greg Cook @GregCook2011]

@drgurner 💯 true

[signüll @signulll]

i find that most people can’t ask for what they want cuz they haven’t figured out what that is.

the request is actually the easy part.

[Greg Cook @GregCook2011]

@signulll Agree

[Greg Cook @GregCook2011]

@idiom_bytes Fair, and suggest that this is not enough money

[Nivi @nivi]

AGI, consciousness, and freewill will probably require a new theory of computation that doesn’t preclude any physically possible outcome.

[Greg Cook @GregCook2011]

@nivi In this timeline version, with it being Elon’s game, which player life number is he on, us all as the NPCs

[Strife @Strife212]

LLMs are intelligent, but they clearly aren't conscious?

You could (incredibly slowly) run an LLM by hand by doing the matrix calculations with a pen and paper, would that be conscious? There is zero difference between doing that and doing it on a GPU except its faster.

[Greg Cook @GregCook2011]

@Strife212 How do humans gain consciousness? At birth, born of parents who are conscious? How does it get transferred/imbued? Can the same spark run from the calculations? In a form that is conscious or does it only gain understanding? cc @Kantrowitz

[Greg Cook @GregCook2011]

@drmichaellevin @graycrawford @David_Gunkel Agree and disagree with your characterization in parts

[Greg Cook @GregCook2011]

@a16z @drfeifei @autodesk @BerntBornich @bilawalsidhu Words are the mapping not the territory