Power & Energy
Articles (16)
Sophia Space's Orbital Data Center Patent Trades Compute Density for Radiator Area
A worked example budgets 259 W of solar output per square meter of tile, implying a similar heat load. SpaceX's draft AI1 makes the opposite supercomputing bet: hotter liquid cooling and pumps.
FERC's grid fast lane comes with a curtailment clause
FERC is pushing grid operators to create faster paths for large loads. The price may be flexibility when the system runs short.
AI's Power Moat Is Already Held: Contracted Megawatts Are the Buildout's Scarcest Asset
Shells rise in 18 to 24 months; grid power averages four years. The biggest AI builders have already contracted the firm megawatts everyone else is still queuing for.
Time to First Token Is a Real Metric. It Isn't the One That Defines the Era.
Time to first token is the AI industry's favorite candidate for era-defining metric. It is a real whole-stack signal, not a stand-in for business success.
One GPU in Orbit, a Million Satellites on Paper: Inside the Orbital Data Center Filing Arms Race
Since Starcloud flew the first H100 last November, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Starcloud, and a five-month-old startup have filed with the FCC for constellations totaling more than a million satellites. The physics hasn't moved as fast as the paperwork.
Inside Meta's 83,000-GPU AI Supercomputer: Why It Runs the Silicon at 80% Power on Purpose
Meta's first end-to-end account of running a 150 MW, 83,000-GB200 cluster - when power is the ceiling, the cluster, not the chip, is what you optimize.
Kajaani: a sovereign-plus-EuroHPC supercomputing campus comes into focus
Finland's new 33.9 PF Roihu supercomputer triples national capacity and shares its hydroelectric Kajaani site with EuroHPC's LUMI - a two-tier sovereign-plus-EuroHPC campus under one operator.
The 800V DC Rack Transition: How Rubin Ultra Is Rewiring the Supercomputing Industry's Last 50 Feet
NVIDIA has published the architecture. OCP and the supplier alliance have published the spec and the timeline. The colocation operators have published, so far, very little.
Thermodynamic Computing's First Silicon Is Back from the Fab. The Power Math Comes Next.
Normal Computing's CN101 is in characterization. Extropic has a prototype platform, an MIT-co-authored arXiv preprint, and an ETH Zurich hackathon in June. After two years as a manifesto, thermodynamic computing is producing the kind of artifacts readers can evaluate.
AI Training Power Demand Is Outrunning Grid Build Times. xAI Bet It Could Outrun Regulators Too.
xAI operates 46 unpermitted gas turbines at its Southaven power plant. A federal court ruling will determine if the turbine-first playbook is viable.
When the Grid Says No: Denmark and the New Shape of the Power Question
Energinet didn't pause grid connections in a contested metro or a zoning fight - it paused them because 60 GW of queued demand met a 7 GW national peak, and the math stopped working.
Sustainability and Quantum Systems Move to Center of Jack Dongarra HPC Award
Devesh Tiwari named fifth recipient of the Jack Dongarra Early Career Award, with the committee citing production-deployed energy work and NISQ-era systems research.
Anthropic Locks 3.5 GW of Google TPU Capacity as Commercial AI Pre-Purchases Infrastructure Scientific Computing Will Need
Broadcom will supply Anthropic with 3.5 GW of Google TPU capacity through 2031; ~23-35x the power of DOE's largest planned science supercomputer.
Nvidia's $1 Trillion Backlog Hits the Grid Capacity Wall
Nvidia projects $1T in Blackwell orders through 2027, but 72% of operators cite grid capacity as the primary constraint. Power now limits AI.
A Missile Can Take Down an Availability Zone. That's Enough.
Iranian drone strikes took down AWS availability zones in Dubai and Bahrain, forcing a global reassessment of data center siting.
100 Gigawatts: The Data Center Supercycle That's Rewriting Energy Policy
Power has replaced transistor density as the binding constraint on computing growth. The consequences are reshaping everything from real estate markets to geopolitics.