If AI is commoditising, who is Bahrain and who are the Saudis?
This is why SpaceX could be a dark horse in this race. Putting compute in space is expensive but so is building a data center in the US.
You know what's also really hard in a vacuum? Dissipating heat.
Correct. The economics of space-based DCs comes down to permitting delays versus radiator mass.
At ISS-weight radiators (12 to 15 W/kg (EDIT: kg/kW)), you need almost decade-long delays on the ground (or 10+ percent interest rates) to make lifting worthwhile. Get down to current state-of-the-art in the 5 to 10 W/kg (EDIT: kg/kW) range, however, and you only need permiting delays of 2 to 3 years.
If there is a game-changing start-up waiting to be built, it's in someone commercialising a better vacuum-rated radiator.
Saudi will host the biggest data centers in the world
I really couldn't have been more obscure, could I? :P
In 1932, "the first oil field in the Persian Gulf outside of Iran" was discovered in Bahrain [1]. (The same year Saudi Arabia announced unification [2].)
In the end, Saudi Arabia had larger reserves and wound up geopolitically dominating its first-moving rival. In commodities, the game tends to be scale in part through land grabbing. Less who got where first.
To close the analogy, if AI does wind up commoditised, the layers at which that commodity is held are probably between power and compute [3]. So if AI commoditises (commodifies?), Google selling computer (and indirectly power) to Anthropic and OpenAI is the smarter play than trying to advantage Gemini. (If AI doesn't commoditise, the opposite may be true–Google is supercharging a competitor.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahrain_Petroleum_Company
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_the_Kingdom_of...
[3] The alternate hypothesis is it's at distribution.
Source? That would be surprising!
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5654eb6ee4b0e19716ec5...
Showing how old I am with that reference
A more recent article https://www.productplan.com/learn/first-mover-advantage-fast...
I should say it’s “mostly” a myth, there are some fleeting competitive advantages to first mover but a lot of them don’t apply well to tech companies and there isn’t strong historical evidence supporting it.
If you want to benefit massively off being a first mover, you better do the work in figuring it out how you are going to acquire exclusivity that lasts long enough that keeps most firms out.