Dr. Evil and the $100 Billion AI
Ever bigger datacenters reshaped computing into today's services world. Now its getting diabolical.
I’m on the redeye to London. San Francisco to Heathrow. It was urgent, I guess that’s why I’m on the redeye. I’d just gotten pulled into a special project and the architect of said project was in London.
This was around 15 years ago, and it was an existential moment for Microsoft. The mobile wave had crashed over all of technology, but Microsoft had waited too long to catch it and was left jumping in puddles. With a new wave of cloud computing building, Microsoft couldn’t afford to miss out again.
That moment is similar to where we are now with the rapid rise of AI. However, unlike the Microsoft of today leading in AI, at that time we were woefully behind, with a portfolio of products and customers ill-suited for the move to cloud computing.
I was one of a handful of experts plucked for this project who built systems for customers on top of our communications server products. Stuff like email, web sites, chat. Our charter was to create a hybrid architecture so we could start moving these customers from servers residing in their datacenters to services running in Microsoft’s Datacenters.
Thus began the era of building BIG datacenters.
I bought a book to read on the flight. It was about this big shift in the computer industry to cloud computing. The central analogy in the book was the transition of electricity production to centralized power plants. It used to be common for factories to have their own steam engine or a hydroelectric generator. These all disappeared with the advent of power plants. Centralization is more efficient. It’s a lot easier to plug in and not worry about maintaining your own power so you can focus on your own business.
Same with datacenters. Used to be every big company had their own datacenter - typically a pair in different cities for backup in case one had a problem. Even small companies had a closet or two packed with servers.
No more, the rise of datacenters has been dramatic and continues today1.
Unlike electricity where you still need to plug in, centralized computing enables wireless access to all kinds of services from pretty much anywhere - all from that little phone in your pocket. Now and again you might see a cell phone tower, but compute services are pretty invisible compared to the poles and transformers and transmission lines that go along with the distribution of electricity.
Amazon came up with cloud computing - Amazon Web Services (AWS). They figured if it was good enough to run the biggest ecommerce website in the world, why not run other businesses on it.
Today AWS has over 125 datacenters spread across the world, highly connected for access wherever you may be, along with a vast array of services you can use to build any app your heart desires2. One of Amazon’s recent datacenters in Ohio is about 500,000 square feet or 10 football fields.
Microsoft has over 300 datacenters worldwide connected and accessible through a wide range of services similar to AWS3. Microsoft Azure competes with AWS to build apps along with a suite of communications and collaboration services for businesses. These services, called Microsoft 365, have developed at a furious pace since my trip to London and now include Teams and much more.
Microsoft has a datacenter in Washington that’s over 700,000 square feet or a dozen football fields. Building these modern datacenters runs into the 10’s of billions. Back to the power analogy and perhaps somewhat ironically, they require their own power sources given their scale and need for independence from the electrical grid.
What’s past is prologue. Check lout this headline:
Meet Stargate — the $100 billion AI supercomputer being built by Microsoft and OpenAI
If AI isn’t terrifying enough, a $100 billion AI is surely the realm of Dr. Evil.
That’s why Dr Evil is our host today. You could argue I wrote this entire article to create ever evil-er schemes for him and you wouldn’t be wrong.
Stargate is a movie from 1994 that I’ve never seen, but looks amazing. The stargate is dug up in Egypt and it turns out to be a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy. The Stargate premise was super popular and ran as a TV show for 10 years with multiple spinoffs - lets meet some Aliens!
From the movie trailer, Stargate is:
The key to the past
The door to the future
The passage to discovery
Now that’s aspirational and inspirational AI project. It’s all rumor and conjecture but it sure sounds epic.
The headline is a little misleading. It’s not a $100 billion dollar computer/AI, but rather a datacenter. A datacenter runs all kinds of different computing workloads for many different companies. But it’s not much of a stretch to think of a modern datacenter as a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Datacenters aren’t buildings full of disparate computers anymore, but rather highly connected dependent elements working together in a coordinated way.
The Stargate datacenter is meant to be complete or “fully operational” by 2028. It will cover several hundred acres or - to use the measurement of the day - 150 football fields.
Peak evil!
best, Andrew
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Today there are over 10,000 datacenters worldwide with over half of them in the United States.
AWS contributes more to Amazon’s bottom line than amazon.com! In 2021 AWS was nearly three-quarters of Amazons operating profit.
Microsoft still lags AWS but is growing faster. Google is #3 and the three companies together account for two-thirds of the cloud market. Cloud infrastructure is now a $300 billion dollar a year market.
Informative article! Stargate was really good! First few seasons of the show were great. Bring on The Stargate!