The OpenAI math maths

Sep 20, 2024

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Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power. Written just for you!

📈 Trending Up: The DJIA … climate-impacted populations … domestic battery production? … oof … not being awful … tariffs … verticalization? … voter suppression … supporting democracy …
📉 Trending Down: Telegram’s reach in Ukraine … home sales …macOS … SaaS …

Microsoft hungers for nuclear power: Where will the required power and water come from for the present AI boom? Folks expected new, larger data centers to form near areas of power generation. Near nuclear reactors, in other words. (Tenessee, where xAI has its data center, features one of the newest nuclear reactors in the United States, the second unit at Watts Bar Nuclear Plant. Plant Vogtle expanded more recently in Georgia.)

Or you can just turn old plants back on. Constellation is turning Three Mile Island back at a cost of $1.6 billion, planning to “sell all the output to Microsoft Corp. as the tech titan seeks carbon-free electricity for data centers to power the artificial intelligence boom,” Bloomberg reports.
Pretty baller to have your own nuclear reactor.

FedEx has people spooked: Shares of FedEx are off 13% in pre-market trading after its earnings fell flat. Why? The company told investors that for its fiscal 2024 it expects “low single-digit percentage revenue growth rate year over year, compared to the prior forecast of a low-to-mid single digit percentage increase.”

Oof.

China’s venture death? CO has written quite a bit about the slowdown in Chinese venture capital. Axios’ Dan Primack, on the same matter, put it well: “This isn't just about decoupling. It's about dying.” Couldn’t have put it better myself.