Compute & Infrastructure

AI Has a Geography Now

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For years, AI was talked about as if it lived nowhere. It was “in the cloud,” which made it sound borderless, weightless, almost detached from the physical world. But that was always only half true. The cloud has buildings. It has land, substations, cooling systems, permits, cables, backup power, and legal jurisdictions. It can be … Read more

Data Centers, Heat, and the Case for Finding Out Before We Build More

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Supporting AI’s development does not mean suspending judgment about its costs. In an age of climate anxiety, societies are being asked to accept a great many things on faith. Build more transmission. Build more batteries. Build more solar. Build more nuclear. Build more cooling. Build more computation. Much of that may in fact be necessary. … Read more

The Silicon Ceiling: EUV Lithography and China’s AI Constraint

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A single industrial machine — weighing roughly 180 tons and assembled from over 100,000 precision components — may shape the trajectory of global artificial intelligence competition. Built exclusively by the Dutch firm ASML, the Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography scanner is the only commercially available system capable of mass-producing the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips. Since … Read more

AI Reality Bursts the “Bubble”

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Introduction: Beyond the Bubble Narrative As market volatility leads some to question the longevity of the AI sector, many commentators have labeled the technology a speculative bubble. Stock-market bubbles reflect sentiment—optimism, hype, and fear—which can burst overnight. The “bubble” narrative persists because speculative frenzy in public markets is far easier to see than the technical … Read more

The Silicon Fulcrum

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Imagine if humanity received notice that a superior extraterrestrial intelligence was arriving in five years. We would unite immediately. We would pool resources. We would prepare.

But because we are building that intelligence ourselves, we are doing the opposite: fragmentation, secrecy, and zero-sum competition.

In ‘The Silicon Fulcrum,’ I argue that we are racing on a knife’s edge, dependent on a single island for the hardware that will power the most transformative event in human history. The window to fix this is closing.