Jane Street just showed the inside of their AI training data center in Texas. 4,032 GPUs. 56 racks. 8,000 km of fiber. liquid cooling running through every server because air cooling can't handle the heat anymore. but the part that got me was the origin story. Ron Minsky, who co-heads their technology group. said their first compute cluster was literally six Dell boxes stacked on top of each other at the end of a desk row. they called it "the hive." the trading systems sat out in the room with the traders because they wanted to be able to unplug them if something went wrong. at one point, someone vacuuming the office unplugged a live trading system in the middle of the day. from six Dell boxes and a vacuum cleaner incident to a liquid-cooled GPU data center processing trades in under 100 nanoseconds. that's a 20-year arc.
