I often like SemiAnalysis' work, but there's parts of this article that are shockingly under-researched and completely missing critical parts of the narrative.

> Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive.

> Again, clever firms like xAI have found remedies. Elon's AI Lab even pioneered a new site selection process - building at the border of two states to maximize the odds of getting a permit early!

The energy strategy was to completely and almost certainly illegally bypass permitting and ignore the Clean Air Act, at a tangible cost to the surrounding community by measurably increasing respiratory irritants like NOx in the air around these communities. Characterizing this harm as "clever" is wildly irresponsible, and it's wild that the word "illegal" doesn't appear in the article once, while at the same time handwaving the fact that permitting for local combustion-based generation (for these reasons!) is one of the main factors to pushing out timelines and increasing cost.

[1] https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/

[2] https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-...

[3] https://naacp.org/articles/elon-musks-xai-threatened-lawsuit...

More appropriate word is “sly” not “clever”.

It’s called “Semi” analysis for a reason. Dylan Patel is the Jim Cramer of industry reporting for this sector.