If AI is commoditising, who is Bahrain and who are the Saudis?

nostromo 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The company with the access to cheap and plentiful energy and the real estate to build data centers will be Saudi Arabia in your analogy.

This is why SpaceX could be a dark horse in this race. Putting compute in space is expensive but so is building a data center in the US.

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bpye 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Putting compute in space is expensive but so is building a data center in the US.

You know what's also really hard in a vacuum? Dissipating heat.

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JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> You know what's also really hard in a vacuum? Dissipating heat

Correct. The economics of space-based DCs comes down to permitting delays versus radiator mass.

At ISS-weight radiators (12 to 15 W/kg (EDIT: kg/kW)), you need almost decade-long delays on the ground (or 10+ percent interest rates) to make lifting worthwhile. Get down to current state-of-the-art in the 5 to 10 W/kg (EDIT: kg/kW) range, however, and you only need permiting delays of 2 to 3 years.

If there is a game-changing start-up waiting to be built, it's in someone commercialising a better vacuum-rated radiator.

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ambicapter 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Would you want more wattage per kg for a better radiator?

	▲	7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
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	▲	JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes! Thank you–fixed.

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redanddead 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Putting it centrally globally makes a lot of sense, just like connecting airports

Saudi will host the biggest data centers in the world

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mikelitoris 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What does that mean?

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JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> What does that mean?

I really couldn't have been more obscure, could I? :P

In 1932, "the first oil field in the Persian Gulf outside of Iran" was discovered in Bahrain [1]. (The same year Saudi Arabia announced unification [2].)

In the end, Saudi Arabia had larger reserves and wound up geopolitically dominating its first-moving rival. In commodities, the game tends to be scale in part through land grabbing. Less who got where first.

To close the analogy, if AI does wind up commoditised, the layers at which that commodity is held are probably between power and compute [3]. So if AI commoditises (commodifies?), Google selling computer (and indirectly power) to Anthropic and OpenAI is the smarter play than trying to advantage Gemini. (If AI doesn't commoditise, the opposite may be true–Google is supercharging a competitor.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahrain_Petroleum_Company

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_the_Kingdom_of...

[3] The alternate hypothesis is it's at distribution.

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dmix 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Plus the whole thing of first mover advantage being a myth, especially in the tech industry

	▲	JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Plus the whole thing of first mover advantage being a myth, especially in the tech industry Source? That would be surprising!

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mh- 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I believe they were drawing a parallel to oil commoditization, but that's as far as I got.

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Urahandystar 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The app layer is Bahrain.

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catlover76 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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