Can anyone make that make sense? The team was like 15 people and is now 7. Not exactly a large enough team to build out billions of dollars worth of data centers... Maybe they're just going to contract that all out, but this guy and his team were a very smooth, very well greased machine for standing this stuff up quickly and reliably.
Or possibly senior leadership isn’t happy with the pace of DC buildout over the last 5-years.
Real estate, legal, permitting, utility connections, construction, plant fit out, testing and certification, security, customs and immigration, and shipping all need to happen first - and every one of those has room for huge amounts of uncertainty and delay, more so if you're doing it internationally.
There aren't many shortcuts that you can take when you're dealing with a complex combination of hardware, property, and law.
I hate to say it, but probably. It's empty if it's any consolation. I've heard from peers that's why I haven't "launched" [ahead of them? unclear]... as if they're nicely retired with drinks on the beach, or something. Completely blind to the fact that our priorities differ and, well, status.
https://cleanview.co/reports/behind-the-meter-data-centers
/can't read the article
S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-
If Oracle goes down, a lot of businesses are going to be in a lot of trouble, and there will be a lot of fighting over the scraps.
Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding
If you are in an org like that and there is an effort to pin something on technical people inappropriately the reaction when there's solid push back approaches total hysterical breakdown since it's so unexpected. Even if the tech staff "win" they'll be marked for the rest of their time there.
Regarding Java, SAP has long switched over to openjdk (though oracle java is supported in some cases). Specifically, they have their own custom fork of openjdk "SapMachine" precisely to be independent from oracle (FYI: if you look at openjdk upstream you will see many core contributors are employed by SAP)
In general, I would say that the actual tech companies that have to interact with oracle's stuff are generally very well equipped to drop them or have already done so. The bigger issue are legacy "consumers" of oracle (e.g. if Pepsi has their data in oracle DB), which often do not have such contingencies.
Earth Datacenters are a human, NIMBY, ego, misinformation, legal, bureaucracy problem.
I'm going to bet on Space Datacenters.
Edit: classic HN lacking imagination and always wrong about the future
Its answer is you'd need an "absurdly large battery" and a solar farm of over 100 square kilometers, quite possibly up to over 200 square kilometers. And it would need to be built in the desert.
Also, normal utility scale LiON battery sites are only meant to provide stabilization services for hours, not days.
The problem is you have to overspec the solar farm quite a lot because it must not only be able to power a one gigawatt facility, but also generate more than that so it can recharge the battery packs during the day too.
So this just doesn't work. You think datacenter permitting is bad when it only requires some on-site gas turbines? Imagine the difficulty of getting a 200 square kilometer solar farm over the finishing line.
No, it's quite possible Elon is going to win this one. Regulation is expensive! He can just fire a constant stream of satellites into space. The constellation needed to provide a gigawatt of inferencing would be about the same size as today's Starlink system, well within the bounds of what he's proven can be done.
The threat to space based datacenters isn't really the physics of it. It's the risk of a bubble pop that temporarily craters demand and/or an overbuild of terrestrial capacity. Outside of the software industry we don't see huge new blocks of inferencing demand, and OpenAI at least doesn't seem capacity constrained at all right now.
Wouldn't it be best if the data centers were just... good neighbors? Like everyone talking about illegal bribes and impossible moonshots when the answer is just don't suck?
Up till recently, they were a rare enough object that distressed communities still saw the glitz and glam that they are sold with as valuable. Now that brutalist assholes are trying to jam them in every nook and cranny of the earth, word is getting out and people aren't buying it anymore.
There have been some attempts to try floating or water immersed data centers that mitigate or at least hide some of their suckiness, but these were hard and costly, so the incentives weren't there to do them anyway. Maybe now those ideas will resurface and improve, but I expect "bribe, con or sue rural community to destroy their quality of life" is still cheaper and easier.
That would work for a 1 GW data center, during the day, without clouds, during the summer.
A decade old Reddit thread estimated there are 60 square miles of just McDonalds in the country. That is, a McDonalds country footprint of solar panels alone is 39GW.
https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2bq7l2/so_i...
BUT once Earth has a fully paid off space elevator the unit economics will make sense, or if we have orbital space factories and don't have any lift costs, etc. It's all possible, but at a 50 year+ timescale and immense investment. All of which I hope for because I'd like to see more space development and exploration.
If you manage to send a data center with high end processing units, large array of solar panels, even larger liquid cooling and tick shielding against solar rays you’d have spent probably 100x to 1000x the cost of an equivalent earth data center even without considering hardware deprecation.
You’re better off sinking your data center deep in the sea and even that is probably not happening at large scales.
I've always wondered who is gullible enough to even bother watching this kind of garbage, thank you for answering that question.
Most of my assumptions come from discussions like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876105
Also, you very conspicuously avoided talking about the difficulty/impact of a 1GW datacenter in space. One might suspect your motives aren't as impartial as you seem to think.
I don't have any motives, what are you talking about? I don't own SpaceX stock if that's what you're thinking.
What's the difficulty of a 1GW datacenter in space? The number of satellites it requires seems to be within the realm of what SpaceX has already achieved. If the calculations are wrong, by all means say so, I haven't checked them.