just to add a few more reasons not mentioned on X why they chose this place:
Cooling is a major factor. Ulanqab's average temperature is about 4.3°C, enabling free air cooling nearly 10 months a year and very low PUE around 1.1.
Even more decisive is cheap, abundant power—largely wind and solar plus coal—at roughly half the price of eastern China. Add vast open land, dedicated low-latency fiber to Beijing (~2-5 ms),
It actually abuts Hebei which puts it in striking distance of Beijing. I wonder about water though, it’s just grassland so there can’t be much to spare. It would be like building a data center in eastern Oregon.
The enormous water usage values are generally about powerplants providing the power, and even the better reports on that include water use by hydroelectric plants - which makes sense in context of the report, but that context nor sense isn't understood by journalists and hype-men quoting just "trillions of gallons a year, more than X cities"
Is anyone treating Meta's offerings as a serious contender in any real use case? Zuck and co are burning cash hard to try to get people using their models after falling off the wagon for a couple years. It would be wild if those prices aren't total loss leaders.
which is crazy because this was grok's competitive advantage, worse than OpenAI models but better than everything else, now it's less efficient than Opus or Fable 5.1
I think the iPhone mini sold 5-10 million units per year. I don't view that as a flop, and I don't think it merits sarcasm around how "many" people wanted it.
If small phones were a widely popular thing then there would be a company making them successfully or it would’ve been greater than 5% of iPhone sales. An individual company with zero brand power or presence wouldn’t have any decent sales. This is not even considering that the value proposition would be way worse than just buying a slightly bigger and significantly better phone with more R&D put behind it.
The reality is 90% or more of people don’t care about that or even think about it, this sentiment only exists in online tech enthusiast spaces. If you’re in HN you’re as non-representative of the average consumer as one can get.
I think you should always include the iPhone SE in those numbers. It had similar dimensions, was cheaper and even more minimal. If it weren't for the SE, I would have picked a Mini right away.
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