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Analysis, reporting, and commentary on the global AI race.
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WaterChina's Wind-Powered Undersea Data Center Launched Off Shanghai
China has launched the world's first commercial undersea data center powered primarily by offshore wind, located off Shanghai. This innovative facility utilizes seawater for cooling and houses nearly 2,000 servers, marking a significant step in sustainable data infrastructure despite some unverified operator claims.
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PowerThe 'Electron Gap': Why Energy Capacity Limits AI Development
OpenAI's 2025 White House submission highlights a critical 'electron gap' where US power capacity lags significantly behind China, arguing that electricity is now the primary constraint in the AI race. As hardware costs decrease, the cost of energy increasingly dictates AI capacity, making power generation a strategic asset.
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CompaniesTrump Eases Stance on Anthropic After Fable 5 Export Curbs
President Trump announced on June 19, 2026, that Anthropic is no longer considered a national security threat, a week after his administration restricted foreign access to its advanced models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. This shift followed a Commerce Department order and Pentagon designation regarding the AI company.
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ChinaUS Leads China in AI Compute by 21-49x, Not Bitcoin
The true US-China strategic race is in AI compute, where the US holds a significant 21-49x lead over China in 2026, despite a viral card suggesting a Bitcoin competition. US hyperscalers are investing heavily, with $725 billion in capital spending planned for 2026, dwarfing China's estimated $80 billion.
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WaterUS AI Buildout Stalls Amid Water Scarcity, China Forges Ahead
The US and China both face severe water scarcity, but only China is effectively overcoming this challenge in its AI buildout. While 48 US data center projects were stalled by local opposition over water concerns in 2025, China's centralized governance allows it to site computing capacity in water-scarce regions and implement massive water transfer projects.
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PowerSpaceX is buying Cursor for $60 billion. The China angle lives in orbit, not in code.
The Cursor acquisition is a vertical-integration play aimed at Anthropic and OpenAI. The U.S.–China story shows up where SpaceX's own IPO filing points: energy and orbital compute.
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WaterYour Kid’s YouTube Marathon Uses More Water Than an Hour of Asking AI
Your Kid’s YouTube Marathon Uses More Water Than an Hour of Asking AI
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WaterHow Much Water Does It Take to Make a Computer Chip? More Than a Whole City Uses
A single chip factory can drink more water in a day than a small city, and in 2021 it got dire enough that Taiwan made farmers stop planting rice so the fabs could keep running.
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PowerNo, One AI Image Doesn’t Drain a Bottle of Water. Here’s the Real Number.
No study has ever measured how much water a single AI image actually uses, so every “bottle of water per image” claim you’ve seen is an estimate calculated from energy figures, not a real measurement. The best back-of-the-envelope math puts it at roughly a shot glass or two per image, and the famous bottle-sized number actually comes from a study about dozens of GPT-3 text prompts, not images at all. The genuinely water-heavy part of AI sits upstream in chip manufacturing, not in the images themselves.
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