Since GigaWatt doesn't seem to have working pods deployed yet, it's a bunch of buildings with really good power delivery and (I assume) pretty good internet access. You could move in any kind of computing applications. A competitor in the article mentioned renting time to AI researchers.
Network requirements for Bitcoin mining are minimal. And the primary cost factor for AI research will be the computer hardware, not the physical facilities.
Im not sure all the power was ever delivered to the site. The other side of the airport has a very large new data center going in at break neck speed though.
The article says 24 prefab buildings. Building 24 buildings at once as a new company sets off alarm bells for me. It also talks about cost overruns. On prefab buildings? Oof.
From the picture, if you look carefully I think you can see almost a dozen of them in an incomplete state (the one on the far left might be done).
It sounds like they didn't stagger the buildout. I can't imagine the property in Central Washington was the expensive bit. If I were involved in this project I'd have been much more comfortable if they had bought all the land, and come up with a three phase plan where they figure out how to do construction without interrupting operations in the other buildings. If the contractor screws up the first 8 you switch contractors.
Or maybe even better, you plan for 32 buildings and do it in 4 phases. Give your salesforce a story about growth and good things in the future. They can work with that.
In the final years of Sun Microsystems, they converted containers to integrated server rooms and were (starting to? planning to?) sell them. Servers, cooling, access, everything but the power IIRC.
Still one of the more impressive pieces of tech I've seen.
[Edit] I had forgotten that Google was up to something pretty similar during the same time frame.
I feel bad for people who were too ignorant to realize that cryptocurrency is a massive fraud perpetrated by a few very shrewd insiders the same way that Wall Street bankers manipulate financial markets.
13 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 37.5 ms ] threadThe article says 24 prefab buildings. Building 24 buildings at once as a new company sets off alarm bells for me. It also talks about cost overruns. On prefab buildings? Oof.
From the picture, if you look carefully I think you can see almost a dozen of them in an incomplete state (the one on the far left might be done).
It sounds like they didn't stagger the buildout. I can't imagine the property in Central Washington was the expensive bit. If I were involved in this project I'd have been much more comfortable if they had bought all the land, and come up with a three phase plan where they figure out how to do construction without interrupting operations in the other buildings. If the contractor screws up the first 8 you switch contractors.
Or maybe even better, you plan for 32 buildings and do it in 4 phases. Give your salesforce a story about growth and good things in the future. They can work with that.
Still one of the more impressive pieces of tech I've seen.
[Edit] I had forgotten that Google was up to something pretty similar during the same time frame.