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combyn8tor | 4 months ago

Meanwhile in Australia we have a "AI data centre" startup being valued at $1.9 billion and given $330 million to play with, having not built anything yet. It's co-founded by a guy that went to prison for insider trading. His wife is also an investor, who happens to be a prominent Australian influencer. The company previously focused on Bitcoin mining but have pivoted to the AI boom, claiming their cooling systems to be 60% better than competitors. Their first project will kick off soon in the Australian state of Tasmania, where there is nothing much more than sheep and tourists.

https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/firmus-raises-3...

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Hansappreciator|4 months ago

Signs of a bubble in this sector are everywhere. OpenAI is trying to fundraise a $5tn infrastructure buildout on $15bn in annual revenue. That's insane.

What's worse is that OpenAI and the other AI companies are all intertwined. The chipmakers are invested in the datacenter operators are invested in the software guys. When the bubble implodes - and it will implode - the good will go down with the bad, and that's what makes a financial crash a true crash.

bob1029|4 months ago

The AMD/OpenAI deal sounded like the music stopping to me.

overfeed|4 months ago

They should hurry up and build the DCs at double-time then! The last tech crash left us with lots of dark fiber that enabled really cool applications and very low costs.

I can only imagine what could grow out of an oversupply of rack-space and electrical power generation, post-crash.

theteapot|4 months ago

Tasmania doesn't do much sheep farming. They are more into salmon. Maybe you were making a derogatory reference to the local human population? Fair enough.

combyn8tor|4 months ago

Tasmania has 38 sheep per square kilometer and is only surpassed by Victoria with 60 sheep km2. WA has 4 sheep per km2, QLD 1.44, SA 10, NSW 3.

In population terms, Tasmania has 4.5 sheep per person, whereas Victoria has 1.9 sheep per person. NSW 0.28, SA 5.2, WA 3.3, QLD 0.4

[1] https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-in... [2] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/national... [3] https://www.wool.com/market-intelligence/sheep-numbers-by-st...

* Population numbers are one head per person, so actual numbers may vary for Tasmania ;-)

gonzo41|4 months ago

So the real risk with that data center is the fact that Tasmania is a culdesac on the internet. We have three fiber cables coming to the island, all from Victoria (directly to the north). The whole state has lost internet before due to someone in Victoria digging a trench through the cable (yes a silly mistake but we're all humans).

It's not a bad idea to put data centers here, but we really need a few more links out to the world from here.

ggm|4 months ago

Where would you send them to achieve useful path diversity?

bdangubic|4 months ago

> where there is nothing much more than sheep and tourists

kind of like Mississippi but without the tourists part

greenie_beans|4 months ago

people have the weirdest/wrong perceptions of mississippi

fuzzfactor|4 months ago

Regardless of a bubble or not, don't some operators do exceptionally well financially, without a lot of recognition, when things are murky compared to transparent or having clarity?

And how long has this kind of thing probably been going on?

pkaye|4 months ago

Is there a lot of power generation in Tasmania? That is the main criteria for AI data centers from what I heard. Latency is less critical than cost of power.