Thailand’s richest man plans to spend as much as 140 billion baht ($4.3 billion) through Gulf Development over the next five years to expand data centers and other infrastructure needed to support the AI boom https://t.co/Oe4aL7dvVt
Many ethnicities are artificial constructs.
If you have traveled and read history, you will see that clearly.
Countries that are single language monoethnic today, were multiethnic and multilingual 100 years ago.
The southern half of a country that we think as monoethnic can be more closely related to another monoethnic country genetically than it is to the northern people within the same country.
You can see it when you travel.
People look really different within the same country.
NEW: Blackwater founder Erik Prince is Chairman of drone company Swarmer which operates in Ukraine - Swarmer has just signed an MOU with drone company Powerus that plans to merge with a firm where Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are investors. My latest:
https://t.co/hJ4HSmlw0m
NEW: Blackwater founder Erik Prince is Chairman of drone company Swarmer which operates in Ukraine - Swarmer has just signed an MOU with drone company Powerus that plans to merge with a firm where Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are investors. My latest:
https://t.co/hJ4HSmlw0m
🇷🇺🇺🇸 Russia to sign agreement tomorrow with engineering company on TUNNEL between Alaska & Chukotka.
“There will be a tunnel,” Putin’s special envoy Dmitriev said, calling it the biggest infrastructure project between US & Russia.
The reports on the deal being signed with the US counterparts are not correct and probably it got “lost in translation”, Dmitriev stressed.
The agreement will be focused on the design of the tunnel, he added.
Vantor collected new imagery showing the aftermath of the Ukrainian drone attacks on an oil terminal in St. Petersburg, Russia as well as the damaged Steregushchy-class corvette Boikiy in a naval dry dock at Kronstadt, Russia.
In Kronstadt, you can see fire crews working to control the fires onboard the ship with high-pressure water cannons.
📸@vantortech
S. Bleichröder was a German family-controlled bank based in Berlin, founded in 1803 by Samuel Bleichröder. As an agent of the German Rothschild Bank, it was developed by Samuel's son Gerson von Bleichröder, who became known as "Bismarck's banker".
China controls 90% of global rare earths processing and 70% of mining. The U.S. National Defense Stockpile (NDS) has shrunk from nearly $24 billion in 1990 to $1.3 billion in 2023. A 2023 Congressional Research Service report found that it would cover less than half of defense production needs during a conflict.
"America's stockpiles were built for an earlier era," write CFR expert @HillmanJE and Research Associate @IshaanThakker1. “Building resilience against coercion and preparing for the possibility of conflict will require larger reserves, smarter technology, and deeper coordination with industry and allies.”
The U.S. stockpiling system faces five major challenges: industrial bottlenecks in refining and manufacturing; a mandate that is too narrow to address economic coercion short of war; gaps in coverage for emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing; outdated analytics that lag behind commercially available software; and a heavy reliance on foreign sourcing in an era of geopolitical fragmentation.
The Trump administration's $12 billion Project Vault, a public-private initiative to stockpile rare earth elements, is meant "to ensure that American businesses and workers are never harmed by any shortage.” Although the United States has started stocking up, the administration “should expand and modernize the NDS, establish a strategic resilience reserve to meet commercial mineral needs, expand private sector collaboration through Project Vault, and explore plurilateral agreements to scale trusted sources of supply," write Hillman and Thakker.
"Stockpiling is one of history’s oldest responses to scarcity, but accumulating materials is no longer enough. True resilience requires integrating reserves with production capacity, supply chain visibility, and technological upgrades. Done well, an upgraded stockpiling system could identify critical bottlenecks, inform policy responses without overextending its mandate, and prevent economic coercion and shocks from escalating into crises."
Read more in the comments.
If you care about AI/energy infrastructure, the best 32 minutes you'll spend today is on @shaylekann's interview with Amin Vahdat, Google's head of AI infrastructure.
We recorded this at our Transition-AI conference, and we just posted the @CatalystPod vid on youtube. Lots of really good insight here:
They touch on scale. The conventional wisdom has been that bigger is better, and gigawatt campuses are the future. As we head into the inference era, Amin sees a medium number of medium-sized data centers, distributed for geographic latency, with a smaller number of large ones anchoring the fleet.
Then there's the reliability question. The 4 or 5 nines requirement is disappearing. Google's internal customers are already choosing more capacity at lower reliability. Of course, that impacts everything downstream, from grid interconnection, to behind-the-meter buildout.
On BTM power specifically, he says Google's preference is still grid-connected. Provisioning for reliability yourself is expensive. He sees it purely as a bridge play.
Finally, the rise of purpose-built computing. For years, everyone built multi-purpose data centers when compute wasn't so costly. But now they are breaking it up into GPU buildings/TPU buildings based on workload. You give up fungibility, but you gain efficiency.