Gongol.com Archives: January 2025
January 3, 2025
The weather forecast for the Midwest is looking terrible, but all credit is due to the National Weather Service in Omaha/Valley for its extremely creative public messaging about the event.
$80 billion in computing power
Microsoft is planning to spend $80 billion on data centers before the end of the fiscal year -- an amount that ought to make people sit up and take notice. As an infrastructure project, it's huge. ■ $80 billion is more than the $65 billion in electrical grid upgrades promised by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. It's comparable in scale to one of our biggest industries -- roughly the value of net aerospace exports from the US. ■ It's more than the market capitalizations of businesses that are household names, like Ferrari, US Bank, Marriott, BP, or 3M. Most notably, $80 billion is more than the gross domestic products of at least seven states. ■ But Microsoft says it "is on track to invest approximately $80 billion to build out AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world". AI is the subject of immense hype and enormous amounts of overstatement. But $80 billion is an extraordinary amount of real money. ■ If the figures are true (and as a publicly traded company, Microsoft is subject to reporting requirements that will bear them out), it's an investment -- or perhaps a speculation -- of historic proportions.
Finding the January 6th bomber
It's been four years since someone left pipe bombs at the headquarters of the two major political parties, and the FBI still hasn't identified the presumptive terrorist. They've published an estimate of the perpetrator's height (5'7") and a halting security camera video of one of the drops.
