Tech
⚡️4.5 GIGAWATTS⚡️
Jon Keegan

If OpenAI’s Stargate $500 billion mega-super-jumbo data center project is going to be as big as CEO Sam Altman says it is, it will need massive amounts of reliable power.

The Information is reporting that OpenAI has struck a deal for such an insane amount of electricity. Crusoe, an energy/cloud computing/data center startup with “.ai” in its URL, will supply the Stargate project with gas-powered turbines that could generate up to 4.5 gigawatts of power for the project.

The amount of energy secured by OpenAI is more than 2,250% more power than the 200 megawatts used by large hyperscale data centers, and it’s 4.5x the amount that Mark Zuckerberg said would be added to Meta’s data centers in 2025.

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Driverless Waymo struck a child near school in California

A Google Waymo struck a child near a Santa Monica elementary school during morning drop-off last week, as self-driving cars by Waymo, Tesla, and others continue their expansion across the country. In a blog post, Waymo said the fully driverless car detected the child as they emerged from behind a parked SUV, braked sharply, and reduced speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before striking the child. The child suffered minor injuries and walked away.

The company reported the incident to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is currently investigating, adding fresh scrutiny to how robotaxis perform in the wild.

The company reported the incident to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is currently investigating, adding fresh scrutiny to how robotaxis perform in the wild.

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Digging into Microsoft’s cloud backlog

Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing unit is seeing huge demand. In yesterday’s second-quarter earnings call, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company’s commercial bookings increased 230% thanks to large commitments from OpenAI and Anthropic and healthy demand for its Azure cloud computing platform.

Hood said that the company’s “remaining performance obligations” (RPO) ballooned to a staggering $625 billion, up 110% from the same period last year. How long will it take for Microsoft to fulfill these booked services? Hood said the weighted average duration was “approximately two and a half years,” but a quarter of that will be recognized in revenue in the next 12 months.

Shares of Microsoft tanked today, down over 11%, despite the strong beat on revenue and earnings. Investors may be concerned that while huge, that extra demand was coming only from OpenAI, an issue that Oracle recently experienced.

But Hood said the non-OpenAI RPO still grew 28% year on year, which reflects “ongoing broad customer demand across the portfolio.”

US-ART-BASEL

Meta and Tesla are funding the future with their core businesses — but only one of them is still growing

The two tech giants, on back-to-back earnings calls, made it sound like they’re selling the same AI-powered future. But the picture of the underlying businesses, and how they’re using AI to furnish current sales, couldn’t be more different.

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