François VDH

This 100MW data center in UAE is the largest solar powered datacenter in the world. There are currently 1,300 data centers in the world that are bigger than this one, but this one is the largest solar powered one. That’s 10 square kilometres of solar panels you can see. The datacenter itself is 0.02 square kilometres, so a solar powered datacenter is ~500x larger than a data center using any other form of power. A five hundred times larger site. UAE has some of the highest solar irradiance anywhere on Earth, it is an inhospitable desert. Averaging 9.7 hours of sunlight per day with average irradiance above 2,200 kWh/m^2. If you build this somewhere else, you need more solar panels because your irradiance will almost certainly be lower. Even if the world had an infinite supply of free solar panels, solar power will not be free. Anyone who has ever done major capital projects, who looks at where data centers need to be in the next 5 years and the next 10 years… we know it aint solar. Sorry. You struggle to even build a train track that’s 100 miles long and 10ft wide anywhere in the West, there is zero chance of build 100 square mile solar farms for GW compute. This is why people are talking about space compute. Deploying into space is one strategy to solve the constraints. But there are faster and more scalable strategies, that get you to mass deployment of multi GW data centers. There are strategies that also allow you to power the 10 billion robots and their newtonian actuators, that immediately follow the inference demand cycle. Step back and look at the full cycle of this industrial revolution… There will be billions of chips, but there will be trillions of actuators. This biggest part of this revolution is the embodiment cycle, and it’s big by a factor of 20 or 50x over the stuff that comes before it. There is no analogy in human history for the scale of this economy, of the demand it will place on energy and commodities. The humans own the Earth, and if you exist inside their legal system, they won’t let you turn the surface of their planet into glass. But they do want your chips and your actuators to serve their needs and desires. There is a way to do all of this, and so it will happen.

ITALY IS DYING — AND THE NUMBERS ARE BRUTAL Italy just recorded its lowest number of births since 1861. Only 355,000 babies were born in 2025, while deaths reached 652,000 — a net loss of nearly 300,000 people in a single year. The total fertility rate has collapsed to 1.14 children per woman, far below the 2.1 needed to sustain a population. This isn’t a temporary dip. It’s a long-term demographic collapse that threatens Italy’s entire future: shrinking workforce, collapsing pensions, aging society, and disappearing regions. Without massive immigration, Italy’s population would be shrinking even faster. This is what happens when birth rates stay critically low for decades. Italy is the clearest warning sign for many other developed nations heading in the same direction.

Many people do not seem to want data centres built near them, despite the fact that they don't cause that much traffic and often generate a lot of local tax revenue. I suspect it's partly because they're ugly! My proposal:

🚨🇪🇺 BREAKING: The European Commission just told all 27 member states to hurry up with rolling out online age verification, demanding deployment before the end of 2026. Asked today how the system stops anyone bypassing it with a VPN from outside the EU, Vice-President Virkkunen said only that it is "an important part of the next steps."